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Abstract Mounting evidence suggests that luminous fast blue optical transients (LFBOTs) are powered by a compact object, launching an asymmetric and fast outflow responsible for the radiation observed in the ultraviolet, optical, infrared, radio, and X-ray bands. Proposed scenarios aiming to explain the electromagnetic emission include an inflated cocoon, surrounding a jet choked in the extended stellar envelope. Alternatively, the observed radiation may arise from the disk formed by the delayed merger of a black hole with a Wolf–Rayet star. We explore the neutrino production in these scenarios, i.e., internal shocks in a choked jet and interaction between the outflow and the circumstellar medium (CSM). If observed on axis, the choked jet provides the dominant contribution to the neutrino fluence. Intriguingly, the IceCube upper limit on the neutrino emission inferred from the closest LFBOT, AT2018cow, excludes a region of the parameter space otherwise allowed by electromagnetic observations. After correcting for the Eddington bias on the observation of cosmic neutrinos, we conclude that the emission from an on-axis choked jet and CSM interaction is compatible with the detection of two track-like neutrino events observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in coincidence with AT2018cow, and otherwise considered to be of atmospheric origin. While the neutrino emission from LFBOTs does not constitute the bulk of the diffuse background of neutrinos observed by IceCube, the detection prospects of nearby LFBOTs with IceCube and the upcoming IceCube-Gen2 are encouraging. Follow-up neutrino searches will be crucial for unraveling the mechanism powering this emergent transient class.
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Establishing accretion flares from supermassive black holes as a source of high-energy neutrinos
ABSTRACT The origin of cosmic high-energy neutrinos remains largely unexplained. For high-energy neutrino alerts from IceCube, a coincidence with time-variable emission has been seen for three different types of accreting black holes: (1) a gamma-ray flare from a blazar (TXS 0506+056), (2) an optical transient following a stellar tidal disruption event (TDE; AT2019dsg), and (3) an optical outburst from an active galactic nucleus (AGN; AT2019fdr). For the latter two sources, infrared follow-up observations revealed a powerful reverberation signal due to dust heated by the flare. This discovery motivates a systematic study of neutrino emission from all supermassive black hole with similar dust echoes. Because dust reprocessing is agnostic to the origin of the outburst, our work unifies TDEs and high-amplitude flares from AGN into a population that we dub accretion flares. Besides the two known events, we uncover a third flare that is coincident with a PeV-scale neutrino (AT2019aalc). Based solely on the optical and infrared properties, we estimate a significance of 3.6σ for this association of high-energy neutrinos with three accretion flares. Our results imply that at least ∼10 per cent of the IceCube high-energy neutrino alerts could be due to accretion flares. This is surprising because the sum of the fluence of these flares is at least three orders of magnitude lower compared to the total fluence of normal AGN. It thus appears that the efficiency of high-energy neutrino production in accretion flares is increased compared to non-flaring AGN. We speculate that this can be explained by the high Eddington ratio of the flares.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2034437
- PAR ID:
- 10496219
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Volume:
- 529
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0035-8711
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: p. 2559-2576
- Size(s):
- p. 2559-2576
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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