Eddington bias for cosmic neutrino sources

TL;DR

The paper discusses how Eddington bias can lead to overestimating neutrino fluxes from astrophysical sources when using single events, affecting source association claims.

Contribution

It highlights the impact of Eddington bias on neutrino flux estimation and emphasizes the need to account for trial factors to avoid overestimations.

Findings

Eddington bias can inflate neutrino flux estimates by several orders of magnitude.

Uncorrected bias may lead to false associations between neutrinos and sources.

Correcting for the bias could change previous interpretations of neutrino source data.

Abstract

We describe a consequence of the Eddington bias which occurs when a single astrophysical neutrino event is used to infer the neutrino flux of the source. A trial factor is introduced by the potentially large number of similar sources that remain undetected; if this factor is not accounted for the luminosity of the observed source can be overestimated by several orders of magnitude. Based on the resulting unrealistically high neutrino fluxes, associations between high-energy neutrinos and potential counterparts or emission scenarios were rejected in the past. Correcting for the bias might justify a reevaluation of these cases.