Estimating the contribution of Galactic sources to the diffuse neutrino flux

Abstract

Motivated by recent IceCube observations we re-examine the idea that microquasars are high energy neutrino emitters. By stretching to the maximum the parameters of the Fermi engine we show that the nearby high-mass X-ray binary LS 5039 could accelerate protons up to above about 20 PeV. These highly relativistic protons could subsequently interact with the plasma producing neutrinos up to the maximum observed energies. After that we adopt the spatial density distribution of high-mass X-ray binaries obtained from the deep INTEGRAL Galactic plane survey and we assume LS 5039 typifies the microquasar population to demonstrate that these powerful compact sources could provide a dominant contribution to the diffuse neutrino flux recently observed by IceCube.

Matching version to be published in PRD

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Testing decay of astrophysical neutrinos with incomplete information
• Spectral analysis of the high-energy IceCube neutrinos
• High-energy gamma-ray and neutrino backgrounds from clusters of galaxies and radio constraints
• Probing decaying heavy dark matter with the 4-year IceCube HESE data
• Search for Blazar Flux-Correlated TeV Neutrinos in IceCube 40-String Data
• Neutrino lighthouse powered by Sagittarius A* disk dynamo
• Galactic Diffuse Neutrino Emission from Sources beyond the Discovery Horizon
• Possible contribution of X-ray binary jets to the Galactic cosmic ray and neutrino flux
• Identifying Galactic Sources of High-Energy Neutrinos
• Neutrino production in Population III microquasars