Establishing accretion flares from massive black holes as a major source of high-energy neutrinos

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2111.09391
• Publication Date: 2021-01-01
• Authors: Sjoert van Velzen; Robert Stein; M. Gilfanov; M. Kowalski; Kimitake Hayasaki; Simeon Reusch; Yuhan Yao; S. Garrappa; A. Franckowiak; Suvi Gezari; J. Nordin; C. Fremling; Y. Sharma; Lin Yan; Erik C. Kool; Daniel Stern; Patrik Milán Veres; J. Sollerman; П. С. Медведев; R. Sunyaev; Eric C. Bellm; Richard G. Dekany; Dmitry A. Duev; M. J. Graham; M. M. Kasliwal; S. R. Kulkarni; Russ R. Laher; Reed Riddle; B. Rusholme
• Keywords: Flare; Black hole (networking)

The origin of cosmic high-energy neutrinos remains largely unexplained. For neutrino alerts from IceCube, a coincidence with time-variable emission has been seen for three different types accreting black holes: (1) gamma-ray flare blazar (TXS 0506+056), (2) an optical transient following stellar tidal disruption event (TDE; AT2019dsg), and (3) outburst active galactic nucleus (AGN; AT2019fdr). the latter two sources, infrared follow-up observations revealed powerful reverberation signal due to dust heated by flare. This discovery motivates systematic study all supermassive hole similar echoes. Because reprocessing is agnostic outburst, our work unifies TDEs high-amplitude flares AGN into population that we dub accretion flares. Besides known events, uncover third coincident PeV-scale (AT2019aalc). Based solely on properties, estimate significance 3.6$\sigma$ this association Our results imply at least ~10% IceCube could be surprising because sum fluence these orders magnitude lower compared total normal AGN. It thus appears efficiency production in increased non-flaring We speculate can explained high Eddington ratio