Multiwavelength follow-up of a rare IceCube neutrino multiplet

Creators: Aartsen, M. G.; Bellm, E.; IceCube Collaboration; ASAS-SN Collaboration; Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network Collaboration; Fermi LAT Collaboration; HAWC Collaboration; LCO Collaboration; MASTER Collaboration; Swift Collaboration; VERITAS Collaboration

Abstract

On February 17, 2016, the IceCube real-time neutrino search identified, for the first time, three muon neutrino candidates arriving within 100 s of one another, consistent with coming from the same point in the sky. Such a triplet is expected once every 13.7 years as a random coincidence of background events. However, considering the lifetime of the follow-up program the probability of detecting at least one triplet from atmospheric background is 32%. Follow-up observatories were notified in order to search for an electromagnetic counterpart. Observations were obtained by Swift's X-ray telescope, by ASAS-SN, LCO and MASTER at optical wavelengths, and by VERITAS in the very-high-energy gamma-ray regime. Moreover, the Swift BAT serendipitously observed the location 100 s after the first neutrino was detected, and data from the Fermi LAT and HAWC observatory were analyzed. We present details of the neutrino triplet and the follow-up observations. No likely electromagnetic counterpart was detected, and we discuss the implications of these constraints on candidate neutrino sources such as gamma-ray bursts, core-collapse supernovae and active galactic nucleus flares. This study illustrates the potential of and challenges for future follow-up campaigns.

Additional Information

© ESO 2017. Received 14 February 2017; accepted 30 July 2017. Neil Gehrels sadly died during the late stage of the production of this paper. As Swift PI he was an enthusiastic supporter of multi-messenger observations; he will be sorely missed. The IceCube Collaboration acknowledges the support from the following agencies: US National Science Foundation - Office of Polar Programs, US National Science Foundation - Physics Division, University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the Grid Laboratory of Wisconsin (GLOW) grid infrastructure at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, the Open Science Grid (OSG) grid infrastructure; US Department of Energy, and National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) grid computing resources; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada,WestGrid and Compute/Calcul Canada; Swedish Research Council, Swedish Polar Research Secretariat, Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC), and Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Sweden; German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), Helmholtz Alliance for Astroparticle Physics (HAP), Research Department of Plasmas with Complex Interactions (Bochum), Germany; Fund for Scientific Research (FNRSFWO), FWO Odysseus programme, Flanders Institute to encourage scientific and technological research in industry (IWT), Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (Belspo); University of Oxford, United Kingdom; Marsden Fund, New Zealand; Australian Research Council; Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS); the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Switzerland; National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF); Villum Fonden, Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF), Denmark This work made use of data supplied by the UK Swift Science Data Centre at the University of Leicester. Funding for the Swift project in the UK is provided by the UK Space Agency. Part of this work was facilitated by the GROWTH project, a partnership in international research and education, NSF PIRE Grant No. 1545949. ASAS-SN is supported by NSF grant AST-1515927. Development of ASAS-SN has been supported by NSF grant AST-0908816, the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mt. Cuba Astronomical Foundation, and by George Skestos. The Fermi LAT Collaboration acknowledges generous ongoing support from a number of agencies and institutes that have supported both the development and the operation of the LAT as well as scientific data analysis. These include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy in the United States, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules in France, the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), high-energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Japan, and the K. A. Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish National Space Board in Sweden. Additional support for science analysis during the operations phase is gratefully acknowledged from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy and the Centre National d'Études Spatiales in France. The HAWC Collaboration acknowledges the support from: the US National Science Foundation (NSF); the US Department of Energy Office of High- Energy Physics; the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program of Los Alamos National Laboratory; Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACyT), México (grants 271051, 232656, 260378, 179588, 239762, 254964, 271737, 258865, 243290, 132197), Laboratorio Nacional HAWC de rayos gamma; L'OREAL Fellowship for Women in Science 2014; Red HAWC, México; DGAPA-UNAM (grants IG100317, IN111315, IN111716-3, IA102715, 109916, IA102917); VIEP-BUAP; PIFI 2012, 2013, PROFOCIE 2014, 2015;the University of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation; the Institute of Geophysics, Planetary Physics, and Signatures at Los Alamos National Laboratory; Polish Science Centre grant DEC-2014/13/B/ST9/945; Coordinación de la Investigación Científica de la Universidad Michoacana. We thank Luciano Díaz and Eduardo Murrieta for technical support of the HAWC detector. Support for I. Arcavi was provided by NASA through the Einstein Fellowship Program, grant PF6-170148. D. A. Howell, C. McCully, and G. Hosseinzadeh are supported by NSF-1313484. This work makes use of observations from the LCO network. VERITAS research is supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution, and by NSERC in Canada. VERITAS acknowledges the excellent work of the technical support staff at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory and at the collaborating institutions in the construction and operation of the instrument. E. O. Ofek and A. Gal-Yam acknowledge a Minerva grant.

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