Eddington bias for cosmic neutrino sources

Understand

We describe a consequence of the Eddington bias which occurs when a single astrophysical neutrino event is used to infer the neutrino flux of the source.

• A trial factor is introduced by the potentially large number of similar sources that remain undetected; if this factor is not accounted for the luminosity of the observed source can be overestimated by several orders of magnitude.
• Based on the resulting unrealistically high neutrino fluxes, associations between high-energy neutrinos and potential counterparts or emission scenarios were rejected in the past.
• Correcting for the bias might justify a reevaluation of these cases.