High-energy Neutrinos from the Inner Circumnuclear Region of NGC 1068

Abstract

High-energy neutrinos are detected by the IceCube Observatory in the direction of NGC 1068, the archetypical type II Seyfert galaxy. The neutrino flux, surprisingly, is more than an order of magnitude higher than the $\gamma$-ray upper limits at measured TeV energy, posing tight constraints on the physical conditions of a neutrino production site. We report an analysis of the sub-millimeter, mid-infrared, and ultraviolet observations of the central $50$ pc of NGC 1068 and suggest that the inner dusty torus and the region where the jet interacts with the surrounding interstellar medium (ISM) may be a potential neutrino production site. Based on radiation and magnetic field properties derived from observations, we calculate the electromagnetic cascade of the $\gamma$-rays accompanying the neutrinos. When injecting protons with a hard spectrum, our model may explain the observed neutrino flux above $\sim 10$ TeV. It predicts a unique sub-TeV $\gamma$-ray component, which could be identified by a future observation. Jet-ISM interactions are commonly observed in the proximity of jets of both supermassive and stellar-mass black holes. Our results imply that such interaction regions could be $\gamma$-ray obscured neutrino production sites, which are needed to explain the IceCube diffuse neutrino flux.

8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• The Interplay between accelerated Protons, X-rays and Neutrinos in the Corona of NGC 1068: Constraints from Kinetic Plasma Simulations
• Neutrinos from stochastic acceleration in black hole environments
• Constraining the contribution of Seyfert galaxies to the diffuse neutrino flux in light of point source observations
• On the possible jet contribution to the $\gamma$-ray luminosity in NGC 1068
• The Disk Wind Contribution to the Gamma-Ray emission from the nearby Seyfert Galaxy GRS 1734-292
• RADAR-Radio Afterglow Detection and AI-driven Response: A Federated Framework for Gravitational Wave Event Follow-Up
• A New Particle Pusher with Hadronic Interactions for Modeling Multimessenger Emission from Compact Objects
• Neutrino production in the central dark-matter spikes of active galaxies
• UHECRs Propagation and their Multimessengers: Upper limits and the Impact of the Extragalactic Magnetic Field
• A multi-wavelength view of the multi-messenger sources NGC 1068 and PKS 1502+1061