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

van Velzen, Sjoert; Kulkarni, Shrinivas R.; Bellm, Eric C.; Rusholme, Ben; Kool, Erik C.; Fremling, Christoffer; Nordin, Jakob; Yan, Lin; Gezari, Suvi; Dekany, Richard G.; Veres, Patrik M.; Yao, Yuhan; Duev, Dimitri A.; Sollerman, Jesper; Franckowiak, Anna; Riddle, Reed L.; Reusch, Simeon; Medvedev, Pavel; Garrappa, Simone; Hayasaki, Kimitake; Graham, Matthew J.; Laher, Russ R.; Sharma, Yashvi; Sunyaev, Rashid; Stein, Robert; Kowalski, Marek; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Stern, Daniel; Gilfanov, Marat

Preprint

PUBDB-2024-07843

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

van Velzen, S. (Corresponding author) ; Stein, R. ; Gilfanov, M. ; Kowalski, M.DESY* ; Hayasaki, K. ; Reusch, S. ; Yao, Y. ; Garrappa, S.Extern*DESY* ; Franckowiak, A.Extern* ; Gezari, S. ; Nordin, J.Extern* ; Fremling, C. ; Sharma, Y. ; Yan, L. ; Kool, E. C. ; Stern, D. ; Veres, P. M. ; Sollerman, J. ; Medvedev, P. ; Sunyaev, R. ; Bellm, E. C. ; Dekany, R. G. ; Duev, D. A. ; Graham, M. J. ; Kasliwal, M. M. ; Kulkarni, S. R. ; Laher, R. R. ; Riddle, R. L. ; Rusholme, B.

2024

This record in other databases:

Report No.: arXiv:2111.09391

Abstract: 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 per cent of the IceCube high-energy neutrino alerts 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.

Keyword(s): black hole: accretion ; acceleration: efficiency ; particle: acceleration ; optical ; AGN ; time dependence ; neutrino: energy: high ; blazar ; infrared ; gamma ray ; signature ; neutrinos ; galaxies: active ; transients: tidal disruption events

Classification:

ddc:520

Note: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2024), Volume 529, Issue 3, 2559-2576. Accepted for publication in MNRAS AF received funding from the German Science Foundation DFG,within the Collaborative Research Center SFB1491 ‘Cosmic Inter-acting Matters – From Source to Signal’.

Contributing Institute(s):

Research Program(s):

Experiment(s):