English

Multimessenger observations of counterparts to IceCube-190331A

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2020-10-27 v1

Abstract

High-energy neutrinos are a promising tool for identifying astrophysical sources of high and ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR). Prospects of detecting neutrinos at high energies (\gtrsimTeV) from blazars have been boosted after the recent association of IceCube-170922A and TXS 0506+056. We investigate the high-energy neutrino, IceCube-190331A, a high-energy starting event (HESE) with a high likelihood of being astrophysical in origin. We initiated a Swift/XRT and UVOT tiling mosaic of the neutrino localisation, and followed up with ATCA radio observations, compiling a multiwavelength SED for the most likely source of origin. NuSTAR observations of the neutrino location and a nearby X-ray source were also performed. We find two promising counterpart in the 90% confidence localisation region and identify the brightest as the most likely counterpart. However, no Fermi/LAT γ\gamma-ray source and no prompt Swift/BAT source is consistent with the neutrino event. At this point it is unclear whether any of the counterparts produced IceCube-190331A. We note that the Helix Nebula is also consistent with the position of the neutrino event, and we calculate that associated particle acceleration processes cannot produce the required energies to generate a high-energy HESE neutrino.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2007.10193,
  title  = {Multimessenger observations of counterparts to IceCube-190331A},
  author = {Felicia Krauß and Emily Calamari and Azadeh Keivani and Alexis Coleiro and Phil A. Evans and Derek B. Fox and Jamie A. Kennea and Peter Mészáros and Kohta Murase and Thomas D. Russell and Marcos Santander and Aaron Tohuvavohu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.10193},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

10 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication by MNRAS