Candidate Tidal Disruption Event AT2019fdr Coincident with a High-Energy Neutrino

Creators: Reusch, Simeon; Stein, Robert; Kowalski, Marek; van Velzen, Sjoert; Franckowiak, Anna; Lunardini, Cecilia; Murase, Kohta; Winter, Walter; Miller-Jones, James C. A.; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Gilfanov, Marat; Garrappa, Simone; Paliya, Vaidehi S.; Ahumada, Tomás; Anand, Shreya; Barbarino, Cristina; Bellm, Eric C.; Brinnel, Valery; Buson, Sara; Cenko, S. Bradley; Coughlin, Michael W.; De, Kishalay; Dekany, Richard; Frederick, Sara; Gal-Yam, Avishay; Gezari, Suvi; Giroletti, Marcello; Graham, Matthew J.; Karambelkar, Viraj; Kimura, Shigeo S.; Kong, Albert K. H.; Kool, Erik C.; Laher, Russ R.; Medvedev, Pavel; Necker, Jannis; Nordin, Jakob; Perley, Daniel A.; Rigault, Mickael; Rusholme, Ben; Schulze, Steve; Schweyer, Tassilo; Singer, Leo P.; Sollerman, Jesper; Strotjohann, Nora Linn; Sunyaev, Rashid; van Santen, Jakob; Walters, Richard; Zhang, B. Theodore; Zimmerman, Erez

Abstract

The origins of the high-energy cosmic neutrino flux remain largely unknown. Recently, one high-energy neutrino was associated with a tidal disruption event (TDE). Here we present AT2019fdr, an exceptionally luminous TDE candidate, coincident with another high-energy neutrino. Our observations, including a bright dust echo and soft late-time x-ray emission, further support a TDE origin of this flare. The probability of finding two such bright events by chance is just 0.034%. We evaluate several models for neutrino production and show that AT2019fdr is capable of producing the observed high-energy neutrino, reinforcing the case for TDEs as neutrino sources.

Additional Information

© 2022 American Physical Society. Received 16 December 2021; accepted 9 March 2022; published 3 June 2022. S. R. acknowledges support by the Helmholtz Weizmann Research School on Multimessenger Astronomy, funded through the Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association, DESY, the Weizmann Institute, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the University of Potsdam. A. F. acknowledges support by the Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association through the Young Investigator Group program (A. F.). C. L. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) with Grant No. PHY-2012195. The work of K. M. is supported by the NSF Grants No. AST-1908689, No. AST-2108466, and No. AST-2108467, and KAKENHI No. 20H01901 and No. 20H05852. M. C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation with Grants No. PHY-2010970 and No. OAC-2117997. S. S. acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T research environment, funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, Project No. 2016-06012. M. G., P. M., and R. S. acknowledge the partial support of this research by Grant 19-12-00369 from the Russian Science Foundation. S. B. acknowledges financial support by the European Research Council for the ERC Starting grant MessMapp, under Contract No. 949555. The research of A. G.-Y. is supported by the EU via ERC Grant No. 725161, the ISF GW excellence center, an IMOS space infrastructure grant and BSF/Transformative and GIF grants, as well as The Benoziyo Endowment Fund for the Advancement of Science, the Deloro Institute for Advanced Research in Space and Optics, The Veronika A. Rabl Physics Discretionary Fund, Minerva, Yeda-Sela, and the Schwartz/Reisman Collaborative Science Program; A. G.-Y. is the incumbent of the The Arlyn Imberman Professorial Chair. E. C. K. acknowledges support from the G. R. E. A. T research environment funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, under Project No. 2016-06012, and support from The Wenner-Gren Foundations. M. R. has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program (Grant Agreement No. 759194—USNAC). N. L. S. is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) via the Walter Benjamin program—461903330. Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48-inch and the 60-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. AST-1440341 (until 2020 December 1) and No. AST-2034437 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, IN2P3, University of Warwick, Ruhr University Bochum and Northwestern University. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. This work was supported by the GROWTH (Global Relay of Observatories Watching Transients Happen) project funded by the National Science Foundation Partnership in International Research and Education program under Grant No. 1545949. GROWTH is a collaborative project between California Institute of Technology (USA), Pomona College (USA), San Diego State University (USA), Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA), University of Maryland College Park (USA), University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (USA), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan), National Central University (Taiwan), Indian Institute of Astrophysics (India), Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (India), Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), The Oskar Klein Centre at Stockholm University (Sweden), Humboldt University (Germany). This work is based on observations with the eROSITA telescope on board the SRG observatory. The SRG observatory was built by Roskosmos in the interests of the Russian Academy of Sciences represented by its Space Research Institute (IKI) in the framework of the Russian Federal Space Program, with the participation of the Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR). The SRG/eROSITA X-ray telescope was built by a consortium of German Institutes led by MPE, and supported by DLR. The SRG spacecraft was designed, built, launched, and is operated by the Lavochkin Association and its subcontractors. The science data are downlinked via the Deep Space Network Antennae in Bear Lakes, Ussurijsk, and Baykonur, funded by Roskosmos. The eROSITA data used in this work were processed using the eSASS software system developed by the German eROSITA consortium and proprietary data reduction and analysis software developed by the Russian eROSITA Consortium. This work was supported by the Australian government through the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (DP200102471). This work includes data products from the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology. NEOWISE is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. Based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland and Norway, the University of Iceland and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevLett.128.221101.pdf

Submitted - 2111.09390.pdf

Supplemental Material - SM.pdf

Files

2111.09390.pdf

Files (3.6 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
2111.09390.pdf md5:4d60f03fb112616b8f6649c935d591ae	1.4 MB	Preview Download
PhysRevLett.128.221101.pdf md5:316a157c33562f7888d4594f0580aa7f	1.3 MB	Preview Download
SM.pdf md5:7df91a50f1790262da47ab84dca33b9c	844.2 kB	Preview Download

Additional details

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes