Association of the IceCube neutrinos with blazars in the CGRaBS sample
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2024
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| author | Kouch, Pouya M. Lindfors, Elina Hovatta, Talvikki Liodakis, Ioannis Koljonen, Karri I. I. Nilsson, Kari Kiehlmann, Sebastian Max-Moerbeck, Walter Readhead, Anthony C. S. Reeves, Rodrigo A. Pearson, Timothy J. Jormanainen, Jenni Ramazani, Vandad Fallah Graham, Matthew J. |
| author_facet | Kouch, Pouya M. Lindfors, Elina Hovatta, Talvikki Liodakis, Ioannis Koljonen, Karri I. I. Nilsson, Kari Kiehlmann, Sebastian Max-Moerbeck, Walter Readhead, Anthony C. S. Reeves, Rodrigo A. Pearson, Timothy J. Jormanainen, Jenni Ramazani, Vandad Fallah Graham, Matthew J. |
| contents | The origin of high-energy (HE) astrophysical neutrinos has remained an elusive hot topic in the field of HE astrophysics for the past decade. Apart from a handful of individual associations, the vast majority of HE neutrinos arise from unknown sources. While there are theoretically-motivated candidate populations, such as blazars -- a subclass of AGN with jets pointed towards our line-of-sight -- they have not yet been convincingly linked to HE neutrino production. Here, we perform a spatio-temporal association analysis between a sample of blazars (from CGRaBS catalog) in the radio and optical bands and the most up-to-date IceCube HE neutrino catalog. We find that if the IceCube error regions are enlarged by 1$^\circ$ in quadrature, to account for unknown systematic errors at maximal level, a spatio-temporal correlation between the multiwavelength light curves of the CGRaBS blazars and the IceCube HE neutrinos is hinted at least at a 2.17$σ$ significance level. On the other hand, when the IceCube error regions are taken as their published values, we do not find any significant correlations. A discrepancy in the blazar-neutrino correlation strengths, when using such minimal and enlarged error region scenarios, was also obtained in a recent study by the IceCube collaboration. In our study, this difference arises because several flaring blazars -- coinciding with a neutrino arrival time -- happen to narrowly miss the published 90\%-likelihood error region of the nearest neutrino event. For all of the associations driving our most significant correlations, the flaring blazar is much less than 1$^\circ$ away from the published error regions. Therefore, our results indicate that the question of the blazar-neutrino connection is highly sensitive to the reconstruction of the neutrino error regions, whose reliability is expected to improve with the next generation of neutrino observatories. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_07153 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Association of the IceCube neutrinos with blazars in the CGRaBS sample Kouch, Pouya M. Lindfors, Elina Hovatta, Talvikki Liodakis, Ioannis Koljonen, Karri I. I. Nilsson, Kari Kiehlmann, Sebastian Max-Moerbeck, Walter Readhead, Anthony C. S. Reeves, Rodrigo A. Pearson, Timothy J. Jormanainen, Jenni Ramazani, Vandad Fallah Graham, Matthew J. High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena The origin of high-energy (HE) astrophysical neutrinos has remained an elusive hot topic in the field of HE astrophysics for the past decade. Apart from a handful of individual associations, the vast majority of HE neutrinos arise from unknown sources. While there are theoretically-motivated candidate populations, such as blazars -- a subclass of AGN with jets pointed towards our line-of-sight -- they have not yet been convincingly linked to HE neutrino production. Here, we perform a spatio-temporal association analysis between a sample of blazars (from CGRaBS catalog) in the radio and optical bands and the most up-to-date IceCube HE neutrino catalog. We find that if the IceCube error regions are enlarged by 1$^\circ$ in quadrature, to account for unknown systematic errors at maximal level, a spatio-temporal correlation between the multiwavelength light curves of the CGRaBS blazars and the IceCube HE neutrinos is hinted at least at a 2.17$σ$ significance level. On the other hand, when the IceCube error regions are taken as their published values, we do not find any significant correlations. A discrepancy in the blazar-neutrino correlation strengths, when using such minimal and enlarged error region scenarios, was also obtained in a recent study by the IceCube collaboration. In our study, this difference arises because several flaring blazars -- coinciding with a neutrino arrival time -- happen to narrowly miss the published 90\%-likelihood error region of the nearest neutrino event. For all of the associations driving our most significant correlations, the flaring blazar is much less than 1$^\circ$ away from the published error regions. Therefore, our results indicate that the question of the blazar-neutrino connection is highly sensitive to the reconstruction of the neutrino error regions, whose reliability is expected to improve with the next generation of neutrino observatories. |
| title | Association of the IceCube neutrinos with blazars in the CGRaBS sample |
| topic | High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.07153 |