Correlation Between X-Ray and Cosmic Neutrino Sources: From Obscured AGN to Blazars
Abstract
The origin of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos remains a key open question in multimessenger astrophysics. A correlation between unabsorbed hard X-ray emission and high-energy neutrino luminosity has been reported in a sample of six active galactic nuclei with the highest individual IceCube significances, linking neutrino production to compact, photon-rich environments near supermassive black holes. In this work we study whether the threshold-near IceCube excesses associated with seven NuSTAR-observed blazars are statistically consistent with that established relation. Calibrating the relation between the neutrino and hard X-ray luminosities as on the six published sources via a Bayesian regression with errors on both axes, the recovered slope is consistent with , and the intrinsic scatter is \,dex. All seven new blazars are posterior-predictively consistent with this calibration (, ) under the working hypothesis that the published IceCube best-fit neutrino numbers values reflect the signal. A null-injection test confirms that, given the present calibration sample size, the consistency test does not by itself adjudicate between signal and selected-background origins. A distance-free ratio diagnostic places both populations within the photohadronic prediction band, statistically indistinguishable. A flux-space permutation test on the 13-source joint sample, with construction-controlled distance bias, rejects random pairing -- with (). We interpret these results as a conditional consistency check; a detection-level statement requires either an enlarged calibration set or an X-ray-weighted IceCube stacking likelihood with internal data.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.15360,
title = {Correlation Between X-Ray and Cosmic Neutrino Sources: From Obscured AGN to Blazars},
author = {Emma Kun and Imre Bartos and Claudio Ricci and Santiago del Palacio and Francis Halzen and Julia Becker Tjus and Peter L. Biermann and Anna Franckowiak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.15360},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
18 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables. Submitted to PASP