Coincidence of a high-fluence blazar outburst with a PeV-energy neutrino event

By M. Kadler, F. Krauß, K. Mannheim, R. Ojha, C. Müller, R. Schulz, G. Anton, W. Baumgartner, T. Beuchert, S. Buson and 36 more. Nature Physics, 2016

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The astrophysical sources of the extraterrestrial, very high-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube collaboration remain to be identified. Gamma-ray (γ-ray) blazars have been predicted to yield a cumulative neutrino signal exceeding the atmospheric background above energies of 100 TeV, assuming that both the neutrinos and the γ-ray photons are produced by accelerated protons in relativistic jets. As the background spectrum falls steeply with increasing energy, the individual events with the clearest signature of being of extraterrestrial origin are those at petaelectronvolt energies. Inside the large positional-uncertainty fields of the first two petaelectronvolt neutrinos detected by IceCube, the integrated emission of the blazar population has a sufficiently high electromagnetic flux to explain the detected IceCube events, but fluences of individual objects are too low to make an unambiguous source association. Here, we report that a major outburst of the blazar PKS B1424–418 occurred in temporal and positional coincidence with a third petaelectronvolt-energy neutrino event (HESE-35) detected by IceCube. On the basis of an analysis of the full sample of γ-ray blazars in the HESE-35 field, we show that the long-term average γ-ray emission of blazars as a class is in agreement with both the measured all-sky flux of petaelectronvolt neutrinos and the spectral slope of the IceCube signal. The outburst of PKS B1424–418 provides an energy output high enough to explain the observed petaelectronvolt event, suggestive of a direct physical association. The IceCube neutrino telescope in the South Pole has observed several high-energy neutrinos of undetermined origin. Could the third detected PeV event be from blazar PKS B1424–418?

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/915391e58a04d2ce48c5766e2ffa8a638148cbd9

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Citations in the corpus

The Blazar TXS 0506+056 Associated with a High-energy Neutrino: Insights into Extragalactic Jets and Cosmic-Ray Acceleration (2018, result): “…neutrino and an active blazar had been found in a previous study, but with much larger uncertainties in the positional and temporal coincidence (Kadler et al. 2016). sented in Paper 1, together with additional MAGIC data for TXS 0506+056, under the assumption that the association of…”
A Multimessenger Picture of the Flaring Blazar TXS 0506+056: Implications for High-energy Neutrino Emission and Cosmic-Ray Acceleration (2018, background): “…& Vaughan 2012; Sobolewska et al. 2014), and have long been one of the most promising possibilities for HE neutrino production (Atoyan & Dermer 2001; Dermer et al. 2012, 2014; Halzen & Kheirandish 2016; Kadler et al. 2016; Petropoulou et al. 2016; Turley et al. 2016; Gao et al. 2017).”
Leptohadronic single-zone models for the electromagnetic and neutrino emission of TXS 0506+056 (2018, background): “One earlier study (Kadler et al. 2016) claimed a correlation between an IceCube “cascade” event with an energy of 2.0 ± 0.2 PeV, with an angular resolution of 16◦, and a high flux state of a blazar of the flat-spectrum radio quasar (FSRQ) type at a confidence level of ∼ 2σ. Lucarelli et al. (2017)…”
Blazar Flares as an Origin of High-energy Cosmic Neutrinos? (2018, background): “Whereas the angular uncertainty for such shower events is ∼ 10 − 15 deg, the p-value for the coincidence was 0.05 (Kadler et al. 2016).”
Multimessenger observations of a flaring blazar coincident with high-energy neutrino IceCube-170922A (2018, background): “Spatial coincidences between catalogs of blazars and neutrinos have been examined in (64), while (65) investigated one shower-like event with several thousand square degrees angular uncertainty observed in time coincidence with a blazar outburst.”