Two Candidate Obscured Tidal Disruption Events Coincident with High-energy Neutrinos

TL;DR

This study reports two new obscured tidal disruption event (TDE) candidates coincident with high-energy neutrinos, supporting a potential link between TDEs in dusty environments and neutrino production, with low chance probability indicating significance.

Contribution

The paper identifies two new neutrino-associated obscured TDE candidates through mid-infrared outbursts, expanding the sample and supporting the TDE-neutrino connection in dusty environments.

Findings

Two new TDE candidates coincident with neutrinos identified.

Chance probability of coincidence is very low (~0.1-3%).

Supports the potential link between TDEs and high-energy neutrinos.

Abstract

Recently, three optical tidal disruption event (TDE) candidates discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) have been suggested to be coincident with high-energy neutrinos. They all exhibit unusually strong dust infrared (IR) echoes, with their peak times matching the neutrino arrival time even better than the optical peaks. We hereby report on two new TDE candidates that are spatially and temporally coincident with neutrinos by matching our sample of mid-infrared outbursts in nearby galaxies (MIRONG) with Gold alerts of IceCube high-energy neutrino events up to June 2022. The two candidates show negligible optical variability according to their ZTF light curves and can therefore be classified as part of the growing population of obscured TDE candidates. The chance probability of finding two such candidates about $\sim3\%$ by redistributing the MIRONG sources randomly in the SDSS footprint, which will be as low as $\sim0.1\%$ (or $\sim0.2\%$) if we limit to sources with increased fluxes (or variability amplitudes) comparable with the matched two sources. Our findings further support the potential connection between high-energy neutrinos and TDEs in dusty environments by increasing the total number of neutrino-associated TDE and TDE candidates to five, although the underlying physics remains poorly understood.