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MULTI-MESSENGER ASTRONOMY

Neutrinos from tidal disruption events

Nature Astronomy volume 5, pages 436–437 (2021)Cite this article

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Tidal disruption events are an excellent probe for supermassive black holes in distant inactive galaxies because they emit bright multi-wavelength flares that last several months to years. AT2019dsg represents the first potential association of neutrino emission with such an explosive event.

According to the Big Bang theory, the neutrino is the second most common elementary particle in our Universe after photons1,2. Neutrinos are called ghost particles because they interact very weakly with matter, making it difficult to detect them. However, there is a silver lining: neutrinos carry direct physical information about astronomical phenomena that are otherwise obscured, allowing us to understand them more deeply. High-energy astrophysical neutrinos are produced by the interaction of relativistically accelerated cosmic rays with ambient matter or photons. While the observation of astrophysical neutrinos has increased in recent years, they are often detected without a clearly identifiable source. Only three astrophysical sources of neutrinos have been identified so far: the Sun, the 1987A supernova, and the blazar TXS 0506+056 (ref. 3), the last of which is still under debate. The first two associations were detected by Homestake, Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande4, which are sensitive to low-energy neutrinos, while the blazar neutrino was detected by IceCube, which is sensitive to very high-energy neutrinos. Writing in Nature Astronomy, Robert Stein and collaborators5 report that a recently detected high-energy IceCube neutrino, IceCube-191001A, is associated with the tidal disruption event (TDE) AT2019dsg. This neutrino has an energy of ~0.2 PeV and is thus the second most energetic astrophysical neutrino source ever detected, with energies above 100 TeV.

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Fig. 1: An illustration of the disk-outflow-jet system formed after the tidal disruption of a star, as in the case of AT2019dsg.

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  1. Department of Astronomy and Space Science, Chungbuk National University, Cheongju, Republic of Korea

    Kimitake Hayasaki

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  1. Kimitake Hayasaki
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Correspondence to Kimitake Hayasaki.

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Hayasaki, K. Neutrinos from tidal disruption events. Nat Astron 5, 436–437 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-021-01309-z

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