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arXiv · 2207.06314

Beginning a journey across the universe: the discovery of extragalactic neutrino factories

Sara Buson·Andrea Tramacere·Leonard Pfeiffer·Lenz Oswald·Raniere de Menezes·Alessandra Azzollini·Marco Ajello
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Abstract

Neutrinos are the most elusive particles in the Universe, capable of traveling nearly unimpeded across it. Despite the vast amount of data collected, a long standing and unsolved issue is still the association of high-energy neutrinos with the astrophysical sources that originate them. Amongst the candidate sources of neutrinos there are blazars, a class of extragalactic sources powered by supermassive black holes that feed highly relativistic jets, pointed towards the Earth. Previous studies appear controversial, with several efforts claiming a tentative link between high-energy neutrino events and individual blazars, and others putting into question such relation. In this work we show that blazars are unambiguously associated with high-energy astrophysical neutrinos at unprecedented level of confidence, i.e. chance probability of 6 x 10^{-7}. Our statistical analysis provides the observational evidence that blazars are astrophysical neutrino factories and hence, extragalactic cosmic-ray accelerators.

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Sara Buson, Andrea Tramacere, Leonard Pfeiffer, Lenz Oswald, Raniere de Menezes, Alessandra Azzollini, Marco Ajello. 2022-07-13. Beginning a journey across the universe: the discovery of extragalactic neutrino factories. https://doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213%2Fac7d5b

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