A concordance scenario for the observed neutrino from a Tidal Disruption Event

Understand

During a tidal disruption event, a star is torn apart by the tidal forces of a supermassive black hole, with about 50% of the star's mass eventually accreted by the black hole.

• The resulting flare can, in extreme cases of super-Eddington mass accretion, result in a relativistic jet.
• While tidal disruption events have been theoretically proposed as sources of high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos, stacking searches indicate that their contribution to the diffuse extragalactic neutrino flux is very low.
• However, a recent association of a track-like astrophysical neutrino with a tidal disruption event (AT2019dsg) indicates that some tidal disruption events can accelerate cosmic rays to PeV energies.