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

Creators: van Velzen, S.; Stein, R.; Gilfanov, M.; Kowalski, M.; Hayasaki, K.; Reusch, S.; Yao, Y.; Garrappa, S.; Franckowiak, A.; Gezari, S.; Nordin, J.; Fremling, C.; Sharma, Y.; Yan, L.; Kool, E. C.; Sollerman, J.; Medvedev, P.; Sunyaev, R.; Bellm, E.; Dekany, R.; Duev, D. A.; Graham, M. J.; Kasliwal, M. M.; Laher, R. R.; Riddle, R. L.; Rusholme, B.

Abstract

High-energy neutrinos have thus far been observed in coincidence with time-variable emission from three different accreting black holes: a gamma-ray flare from a blazar (TXS 0506+056), an optical transient following a stellar tidal disruption (AT2019dsg), and an optical outburst from an active galactic nucleus (AT2019fdr). Here we present a unified explanation for the latter two of these sources: accretion flares that reach the Eddington limit. A signature of these events is a luminous infrared reverberation signal from circumnuclear dust that is heated by the flare. Using this property we construct a sample of similar sources, revealing a third event coincident with a PeV-scale neutrino. This sample of three accretion flares is correlated with high-energy neutrinos at a significance of 3.7 sigma. Super-Eddington accretion could explain the high particle acceleration efficiency of this new population.

Additional Information

We acknowledge useful discussions and suggestions from J. Becerra González, M. Kerr, W. Lu, K. Murase, and W. Winter. 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 and Grant 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, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Trinity College Dublin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, and IN2P3, France. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. SED Machine is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1106171. 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 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 Fermi-LAT Collaboration acknowledges support for LAT development, operation and data analysis from NASA and DOE (United States), CEA/Irfu and IN2P3/CNRS (France), ASI and INFN (Italy), MEXT, KEK, and JAXA (Japan), and the K.A. Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council and the National Space Board (Sweden). Science analysis support in the operations phase from INAF (Italy) and CNES (France) is also gratefully acknowledged. This work performed in part under DOE Contract DE-AC02-76SF00515. MG, PM and RS acknowledge the partial support of this research by grant 21-12-00343 from the Russian Science Foundation. KH has been supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2016R1A5A1013277 and 2020R1A2C1007219), and also financially supported during the research year of Chungbuk National University in 2021. YY thanks the Heising–Simons Foundation for financial support. SR was supported 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. ECK acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T research environment funded by Vetenskapsrådet, the Swedish Research Council, under project number 2016-06012, and support from The Wenner-Gren Foundations. MMK acknowledges generous support from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. This work was supported by the GROWTH project funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant No 1545949.

Attached Files

Submitted - 2111.09391.pdf

Files

2111.09391.pdf

Files (1.1 MB)

Name	Size	Download all
2111.09391.pdf md5:ced39797dbfadf7ba844ec45cf03b9fe	1.1 MB	Preview Download

Additional details

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