Establishing accretion flares from massive black holes as a source of high-energy neutrinos
arxiv(2021)
摘要
The origin of cosmic high-energy neutrinos remains largely unexplained. For
high-energy neutrino alerts from IceCube, a coincidence with time-variable
emission has been seen for three different types of accreting black holes: (1)
a gamma-ray flare from a blazar (TXS 0506+056), (2) an optical transient
following a stellar tidal disruption event (TDE; AT2019dsg), and (3) an optical
outburst from an active galactic nucleus (AGN; AT2019fdr). For the latter two
sources, infrared follow-up observations revealed a powerful reverberation
signal due to dust heated by the flare. This discovery motivates a systematic
study of neutrino emission from all supermassive black hole with similar dust
echoes. Because dust reprocessing is agnostic to the origin of the outburst,
our work unifies TDEs and high-amplitude flares from AGN into a population that
we dub accretion flares. Besides the two known events, we uncover a third flare
that is coincident with a PeV-scale neutrino (AT2019aalc). Based solely on the
optical and infrared properties, we estimate a significance of 3.6σ for
this association of high-energy neutrinos with three accretion flares. Our
results imply that at least 10
could be due to accretion flares. This is surprising because the sum of the
fluence of these flares is at least three orders of magnitude lower compared to
the total fluence of normal AGN. It thus appears that the efficiency of
high-energy neutrino production in accretion flares is increased compared to
non-flaring AGN. We speculate that this can be explained by the high Eddington
ratio of the flares.
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