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

Abstract

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 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 2022 June. 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 is about ∼3% by redistributing the MIRONG sources randomly in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey footprint, which will be as low as ∼0.1% (or ∼0.2%) if we limit to sources with increased fluxes (or variability amplitudes) comparable with the two matched 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.