Search for Multi-flare Neutrino Emissions in 10 yr of IceCube Data from a Catalog of Sources

Research output: Contribution to journalLetterpeer-review

  • R. Abbasi
  • M. Ackermann
  • J. Adams
  • Ahlers, Markus Tobias
  • T. Anderson
  • G. Binder
  • E. Bourbeau
  • J. Braun
  • C. Chen
  • M. Dittmer
  • R. Engel
  • J. Evans
  • L. Fischer
  • A. Garcia
  • A. Goldschmidt
  • R. Hoffmann
  • M. Jansson
  • B. J. P. Jones
  • D. Kang
  • M. Karl
  • S. R. Klein
  • D. J. Koskinen
  • T. Kozynets
  • M. J. Larson
  • J. W. Lee
  • Y. Li
  • Q. R. Liu
  • Y. Lyu
  • J. Madsen
  • J. Mead
  • M. Meier
  • N. Park
  • L. Paul
  • L. Peters
  • M. Plum
  • M. Rameez
  • A. Rehman
  • S. Reusch
  • S. Sarkar
  • S. Sarkar
  • T. Schmidt
  • A. Schneider
  • A. Sharma
  • Stuttard, Thomas Simon
  • M. J. Weiss
  • M. Wolf
  • X. W. Xu
  • Y. Xu
  • S. Yu
  • Z. Zhang
  • Icecube Collaboration

A recent time-integrated analysis of a catalog of 110 candidate neutrino sources revealed a cumulative neutrino excess in the data collected by IceCube between 2008 April 6 and 2018 July 10. This excess, inconsistent with the background hypothesis in the Northern Hemisphere at the 3.3 sigma level, is associated with four sources: NGC 1068, TXS 0506+056, PKS 1424+240, and GB6 J1542+6129. This Letter presents two time-dependent neutrino emission searches on the same data sample and catalog: a point-source search that looks for the most significant time-dependent source of the catalog by combining space, energy, and time information of the events, and a population test based on binomial statistics that looks for a cumulative time-dependent neutrino excess from a subset of sources. Compared to previous time-dependent searches, these analyses enable a feature to possibly find multiple flares from a single direction with an unbinned maximum-likelihood method. M87 is found to be the most significant time-dependent source of this catalog at the level of 1.7 sigma post-trial, and TXS 0506+056 is the only source for which two flares are reconstructed. The binomial test reports a cumulative time-dependent neutrino excess in the Northern Hemisphere at the level of 3.0 sigma associated with four sources: M87, TXS 0506+056, GB6 J1542+6129, and NGC 1068.

Original languageEnglish
Article number45
JournalAstrophysical Journal Letters
Volume920
Issue number2
Number of pages20
ISSN2041-8205
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Oct 2021

    Research areas

  • BLAZAR TXS 0506+056, ASTROPHYSICAL SOURCES, COINCIDENT, JETS, MODEL, M87

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