Super-Accreting Active Galactic Nuclei as Neutrino Sources

• Autores: Romero, Gustavo Esteban; Sotomayor Checa, Pablo Omar
• Año de publicación: 2025
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: artículo
• Materia: Ciencias Astronómicas; galaxies: active; galaxies: nuclei; galaxies: Seyfert; ISM: jets and outflows; radiation mechanisms: non-thermal
• Institución: Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) often exhibit broad-line regions (BLRs), populated by highvelocity clouds in approximately Keplerian orbits around the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) at subparsec scales. During episodes of intense accretion at super-Eddington rates, the accretion disk can launch a powerful, radiation-driven wind. This wind may overtake the BLR clouds, forming bowshocks around them. Two strong shocks arise: one propagating into the wind, and the other into the cloud. If the shocks are adiabatic, electrons and protons can be efficiently accelerated via a Fermi-type mechanism to relativistic energies. In sufficiently dense winds, the resulting high-energy photons are absorbed and reprocessed within the photosphere, while neutrinos produced in inelastic pp collisions escape. In this paper, we explore the potential of super-accreting AGNs as neutrino sources. We propose a new class of neutrino emitter: an AGN lacking jets and gamma-ray counterparts, but hosting a strong, opaque, disk-driven wind. As a case study, we consider a supermassive black hole with MBH = 106 M⊙ and accretion rates consistent with tidal disruption events (TDEs). We compute the relevant cooling processes for the relativistic particles under such conditions and show that super-Eddington accreting SMBHs can produce detectable neutrino fluxes with only weak electromagnetic counterparts. The neutrino flux may be observable by the next-generation IceCube Observatory (IceCube-Gen2) in nearby galaxies with a high BLR cloud filling factor. For galaxies hosting more massive black holes, detection is also possible with moderate filling factors if the source is sufficiently close, or at larger distances if the filling factor is high. Our model thus provides a new and plausible scenario for high-energy extragalactic neutrino sources, where both the flux and timescale of the emission are determined by the number of clouds orbiting the black hole and the duration of the super-accreting phase.
Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas
Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía