A hadronuclear interpretation of a high-energy neutrino event coincident with a blazar flare

Understand

Although many high-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube telescope are believed to have anextraterrestrial origin, their astrophysical sources remain a mystery.

• Recently, an unprecedenteddiscovery of a high-energy muon neutrino event coincident with a multiwavelength flare from ablazar, TXS 0506+056, shed some light on the origin of the neutrinos.
• It is usually believed that ablazar 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 hadronuclearinteractions between the accelerated cosmic-ray protons in the relativistic jet and the dense gasclouds in the vicinity of the SMBH.
• Such a scenario only requires a moderate proton power in thejet, which could be much smaller than that required in the conventional hadronic model whichinstead calls upon the photomeson process.