The discovery of extraterrestrial very-high-energy neutrinos by the IceCube collaboration has launched a quest for the identification of their astrophysical sources. Gamma-ray blazars have been predicted to yield a cumulative neutrino signal exceeding the atmospheric background above energies of 100 TeV, assuming that both the neutrinos and the γ-ray photons 2 are produced by accelerated protons in relativistic jets. Since the background spectrum falls steeply with increasing energy, the individual events with the clearest signature of being of an extraterrestrial origin are those at PeV energies. Inside the large positional-uncertainty fields of the first two PeV neutrinos detected by IceCube, the integrated emission of the blazar population has a sufficiently high electromagnetic flux to explain the detected IceCube events, but fluences of individual objects are too low to make an unambiguous source association.Here, we report that a major outburst of the blazar PKS B1424−418 occurred in temporal and positional coincidence with the third PeV-energy neutrino event (IC 35) detected by IceCube. Based on an analysis of the full sample of γ-ray blazars in the IC 35 field and assuming a photo-hadronic emission model, we show that the long-term average γ-ray emission of blazars as a class is in agreement with both the measured all-sky flux of PeV neutrinos and the spectral slope of the IceCube signal. The outburst of PKS B1424−418 has provided an energy output high enough to explain the observed PeV event, indicative of a direct physical association.The neutrino excess detected by IceCube comprises 37 events with energies between 30 TeV and 2 PeV, rejecting a purely atmospheric origin at a significance of 5.7 standard deviations [1][2][3] .These events show a broad distribution across both hemispheres of the sky consistent with an extragalactic source population. Due to the very steep background of atmospheric neutrinos, events at PeV energies are best suited for attempting to establish associations with individual blazars. In the first two years of observations, IceCube detected two events with about 1 PeV of deposited energy 1, 2 (IC 14, and IC 20; dubbed 'Bert' and 'Ernie') the diffuse neutrino flux due to the integrated emission of AGN in a given large field at a given time, as well as the maximum possible neutrino flux associated with an individual object of the sample.Blazars are radio-loud AGN with jets oriented close to the line of sight. This substantially increases the apparent brightness of these objects owing to the Doppler boosting of the emission from the relativistically moving emission zones. A direct association of a PeV-neutrino with an * A different analysis of IceCube muon neutrinos finds an excess signal also from the northern sky 14 . † http://pulsar.sternwarte.uni-erlangen.de/tanami 4 individual γ-ray blazar would have the important implication that a sizeable fraction of their observed γ-ray emission must be due to hadronic decays, and that blazar jets are also sources of ultra-high-energy cos...
The IceCube Collaboration has announced the discovery of a neutrino flux in excess of the atmospheric background. Owing to the steeply falling atmospheric background spectrum, events at PeV energies most likely have an extraterrestrial origin. We present the multiwavelength properties of the six radio-brightest blazars that are positionally coincident with these events using contemporaneous data of the TANAMI blazar sample, including high-resolution images and spectral energy distributions. Assuming the X-ray to γ-ray emission originates in the photoproduction of pions by accelerated protons, the integrated predicted neutrino luminosity of these sources is high enough to explain the two detected PeV events.
PKS 1718−649 is one of the closest and most comprehensively studied candidates of a young active galactic nucleus (AGN) that is still embedded in its optical host galaxy. The compact radio structure, with a maximal extent of a few parsecs, makes it a member of the group of compact symmetric objects (CSO). Its environment imposes a turnover of the radio synchrotron spectrum towards lower frequencies, also classifying PKS 1718−649 as gigahertz-peaked radio spectrum (GPS) source. Its close proximity has allowed the first detection of extended X-ray emission in a GPS/CSO source with Chandra that is for the most part unrelated to nuclear feedback. However, not much is known about the nature of this emission. By co-adding all archival Chandra data and complementing these datasets with the large effective area of XMM-Newton, we are able to study the detailed physics of the environment of PKS 1718−649. Not only can we confirm that the bulk of the kiloparsec-scale environment emits in the soft X-rays, but we also identify the emitting gas to form a hot, collisionally ionized medium. While the feedback of the central AGN still seems to be constrained to the inner few parsecs, we argue that supernovae are capable of producing the observed large-scale X-ray emission at a rate inferred from its estimated star formation rate.
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