2023/05/18 by S. Buson, Buson, Sara, A. Tramacere +15 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #Neutrino Physics Research #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.11263
openalex publication_date 2023/05/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Identifying the astrophysical sources responsible for the high-energy cosmic neutrinos has been a longstanding challenge. In a previous work, we report evidence for a spatial correlation between blazars from the 5th Roma-BZCat catalog and neutrino data of the highest detectable energies, i.e. >0.1 PeV, collected by the IceCube Observatory in the southern celestial hemisphere. The statistical significance is found at the level of 2 x 10-6 post-trial. In this work we test whether a similar correlation exists in the northern hemisphere, were IceCube is mostly sensitive to <0.1 PeV energies. We find a consistent correlation between blazars and northern neutrino data at the pre-trial p-value of 5.12 x 10-4, and a post-trial chance probability of 6.79 x 10-3. Combining the post-trial probabilities observed for the southern and northern experiments yields a global post-trial chance probability of 2.59 x 10-7 for the genuineness of such correlation. This implies that the spatial correlation is highly unlikely to arise by chance. Our studies push forward an all-sky subset of 52 objects as highly likely PeVatron extragalactic accelerators.