On the Neutrino Flares from the Direction of TXS 0506+056

Understand

For the first time since the discovery of high-energy cosmic neutrinos by IceCube, a multimessenger campaign identified a distant gamma ray blazar, TXS 0506+056, as the source of a high-energy neutrino.

• The extraordinary brightness of the blazar despite its distance suggests that it may belong to a special class of sources that produce cosmic rays.
• Moreover, over the last 10 years of data, the high-energy neutrino flux from the source is dominated by a previous neutrino flare in 2014, which implies that flaring sources strongly contribute to the cosmic ray flux.
• We investigate the contribution of this subclass of flaring blazars to the high-energy neutrino flux and examine its connection to the very high energy cosmic ray observations.