Candidate Tidal Disruption Event AT2019fdr Coincident with a High-Energy Neutrino

03 Jun 2022

Simeon Reusch, Robert Stein et al.

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Today in PRL, we published another result from our ZTF neutrino follow-up program.

In October 2019, we had already identified the Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) AT2019dsg as the probable source of high-energy neutrino.

In this new work, we report the discovery of a second likely TDE-neutrino association. We found the candidate TDE AT2019fdr during follow-up of the high-energy neutrino IC200530A, detected by IceCube on 30th May 2020. Having identified a new potential neutrino source, we triggered a broad multi-wavelength follow-up campaign to characterise the source.

at2019fdr_fig1.png

The multi-wavelength properties of the source suggest it is most likely a TDE in an AGN.

Finding two probable TDE-neutrino associations with our program is very unlikely to have happened by chance. The probability of finding two such bright TDEs coincident with neutrinos is just 0.034%. Taken together, our two discoveries suggest that TDEs contribute at least 8% of the total diffuse neutrino flux observed by IceCube.