Beginning a journey across the universe: the discovery of extragalactic neutrino factories

TL;DR

This paper provides strong statistical evidence linking blazars to high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, establishing them as extragalactic cosmic-ray accelerators and neutrino factories.

Contribution

It unambiguously associates blazars with high-energy neutrinos at unprecedented confidence, confirming their role as extragalactic neutrino sources.

Findings

Blazars are statistically linked to high-energy neutrinos with a chance probability of 6 x 10^{-7}.

Blazars are confirmed as astrophysical neutrino factories.

Blazars are identified as extragalactic cosmic-ray accelerators.

Abstract

Neutrinos are the most elusive particles in the Universe, capable of traveling nearly unimpeded across it. Despite the vast amount of data collected, a long standing and unsolved issue is still the association of high-energy neutrinos with the astrophysical sources that originate them. Amongst the candidate sources of neutrinos there are blazars, a class of extragalactic sources powered by supermassive black holes that feed highly relativistic jets, pointed towards the Earth. Previous studies appear controversial, with several efforts claiming a tentative link between high-energy neutrino events and individual blazars, and others putting into question such relation. In this work we show that blazars are unambiguously associated with high-energy astrophysical neutrinos at unprecedented level of confidence, i.e. chance probability of 6 x 10^{-7}. Our statistical analysis provides the observational evidence that blazars are astrophysical neutrino factories and hence, extragalactic cosmic-ray accelerators.