No Arabic abstract
Observational information on high-energy astrophysical neutrinos is being continuously collected by the IceCube observatory. However, the sources of neutrinos are still unknown. In this study, we use radio very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) data for a complete VLBI-flux-density limited sample of active galactic nuclei (AGN). We address the problem of the origin of astrophysical neutrinos with energies above 200 TeV in a statistical manner. It is found that AGN positionally associated with IceCube events have typically stronger parsec-scale cores than the rest of the sample. The post-trial probability of a chance coincidence is 0.2%. We select the four strongest AGN as highly probable associations: 3C 279, NRAO 530, PKS 1741-038, and PKS 2145+067. Moreover, we find an increase of radio emission at frequencies above 10 GHz around neutrino arrival times for several other VLBI-selected AGN on the basis of RATAN-600 monitoring. The most pronounced example of such behavior is PKS 1502+106. We conclude that AGN with bright Doppler-boosted jets constitute an important population of neutrino sources. High-energy neutrinos are produced in their central parsec-scale regions, probably in proton-photon interactions at or around the accretion disk. Radio-bright AGN that are likely associated with neutrinos have very diverse gamma-ray properties suggesting that gamma-rays and neutrinos may be produced in different regions of AGN and not directly related. A small viewing angle of the jet-disk axis is, however, required to detect either of them.
The IceCube experiment has recently reported the first observation of high-energy cosmic neutrinos. Their origin is still unknown. In this paper, we investigate the possibility that they originate in active galaxies. We show that hadronic interactions (pp) in the generally less powerful, more frequent, FR-I radio galaxies are one of the candidate source classes being able to accommodate the observation while the more powerful, less frequent, class of FR-II radio galaxies has too low of a column depths to explain the signal.
We report the detection of a non-zero time delay between radio emission measured by the VLBA at 15.4 GHz and gamma-ray radiation (gamma-ray leads radio) registered by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope for a sample of 183 radio and gamma-ray bright active galactic nuclei (AGNs). For the correlation analysis we used 100 MeV - 100 GeV gamma-ray photon fluxes, taken from monthly binned measurements from the first Fermi LAT catalog, and 15.4 GHz radio flux densities from the MOJAVE VLBA program. The correlation is most pronounced if the core flux density is used, strongly indicating that the gamma-ray emission is generated within the compact region of the 15 GHz VLBA core. Determining the Pearsons r and Kendalls tau correlation coefficients for different time lags, we find that for the majority of sources the radio/gamma-ray delay ranges from 1 to 8 months in the observers frame and peaks at about 1.2 months in the sources frame. We interpret the primary source of the time delay to be synchrotron opacity in the nuclear region.
We interpret the recent discovery of a preferable VLBI/Gaia offset direction for radio-loud active galactic nuclei (AGNs) along the parsec-scale radio jets as a manifestation of their optical structure on scales of 1 to 100 milliarcseconds. The extended jet structure affects the Gaia position stronger than the VLBI position due to the difference in observing techniques. Gaia detects total power while VLBI measures the correlated quantity, visibility, and therefore, sensitive to compact structures. The synergy of VLBI that is sensitive to the position of the most compact source component, usually associated with the opaque radio core, and Gaia that is sensitive to the centroid of optical emission, opens a window of opportunity to study optical jets at milliarcsecond resolution, two orders of magnitude finer than the resolution of most existing optical instruments. We demonstrate that strong variability of optical jets is able to cause a jitter comparable to the VLBI/Gaia offsets at a quiet state, i.e. several milliarcseconds. We show that the VLBI/Gaia position jitter correlation with the AGN optical light curve may help to locate the region where the flare occurred, estimate its distance from the super-massive black hole and the ratio of the flux density in the flaring region to the total flux density.
A new class of low-power compact radio sources with limited jet structures, named FR0, is emerging from recent radio-optical surveys. This abundant population of radio galaxies, five times more numerous than FRIs in the local Universe (z$<$0.05), represent a potentially interesting target at high and very-high energies (greater than 100 GeV), as demonstrated by a single case of Fermi detection. Furthermore, these radio galaxies have been recently claimed to contribute non-negligibly to the extra-galactic $gamma$-ray background and to be possible cosmic neutrino emitters. Here, we review the radio through X-ray properties of FR0s to predict their high-energy emission (from MeV to TeV), in light of the near-future facilities operating in this band.
We investigate the possibility that radio-bright active galactic nuclei (AGN) are responsible for the TeV--PeV neutrinos detected by IceCube. We use an unbinned maximum-likelihood-ratio method, 10 years of IceCube muon-track data, and 3388 radio-bright AGN selected from the Radio Fundamental Catalog. None of the AGN in the catalog have a large global significance. The two most significant sources have global significance of $simeq$ 1.5$sigma$ and 0.8$sigma$, though 4.1$sigma$ and 3.8$sigma$ local significance. Our stacking analyses show no significant correlation between the whole catalog and IceCube neutrinos. We infer from the null search that this catalog can account for at most 30% (95% CL) of the diffuse astrophysical neutrino flux measured by IceCube. Moreover, our results disagree with recent work that claimed a 4.1$sigma$ detection of neutrinos from the sources in this catalog, and we discuss the reasons of the difference.