Hadronuclear interpretation of a high-energy neutrino event coincident with a blazar flare
- Although many high-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube telescope are believed to have an extraterrestrial origin, their astrophysical sources remain a mystery. Recently, an unprecedented discovery of a high-energy muon neutrino event coincident with a multiwavelength flare from a blazar, TXS 0506 + 056, shed some light on the origin of the neutrinos. It is usually believed that a blazar is produced by a relativistic jet launched from an accreting supermassive black hole (SMBH). Here, we show that the high-energy neutrino event can be interpreted by the inelastic hadronuclear interactions between the accelerated cosmic-ray protons in the relativistic jet and the dense gas clouds in the vicinity of the SMBH. Such a scenario only requires a moderate proton power in the jet, which could be much smaller than that required in the conventional hadronic model which instead calls upon the photomeson process. Meanwhile, the flux of the multiwavelength flare from the optical to gamma-ray band can be well explained by invoking a secondAlthough many high-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube telescope are believed to have an extraterrestrial origin, their astrophysical sources remain a mystery. Recently, an unprecedented discovery of a high-energy muon neutrino event coincident with a multiwavelength flare from a blazar, TXS 0506 + 056, shed some light on the origin of the neutrinos. It is usually believed that a blazar is produced by a relativistic jet launched from an accreting supermassive black hole (SMBH). Here, we show that the high-energy neutrino event can be interpreted by the inelastic hadronuclear interactions between the accelerated cosmic-ray protons in the relativistic jet and the dense gas clouds in the vicinity of the SMBH. Such a scenario only requires a moderate proton power in the jet, which could be much smaller than that required in the conventional hadronic model which instead calls upon the photomeson process. Meanwhile, the flux of the multiwavelength flare from the optical to gamma-ray band can be well explained by invoking a second radiation zone in the jet at a larger distance to the SMBH. In our model, the neutrino emission lasts a shorter time than the multiwavelength flare, so the neutrino event is not necessarily correlated with the flare, but it is probably accompanied by a spectrum hardening above a few giga-electron-volt (GeV).…
Author details: | Ruo-Yu Liu, Kai Wang, Rui XueORCiD, Andrew M. Taylor, Xiang-Yu Wang, Zhuo Li, Huirong YanORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.063008 |
ISSN: | 2470-0010 |
ISSN: | 2470-0029 |
Title of parent work (English): | Physical review : D, Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology |
Publisher: | American Physical Society |
Place of publishing: | Melville |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2019/03/12 |
Publication year: | 2019 |
Release date: | 2021/03/17 |
Volume: | 99 |
Issue: | 6 |
Number of pages: | 11 |
Funding institution: | NationalKey R&D program of China [2018YFA0404203]; NSFCNational Natural Science Foundation of China [11625312, 11851304] |
Organizational units: | Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Institut für Physik und Astronomie |
DDC classification: | 5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 53 Physik / 530 Physik |
Peer review: | Referiert |