Beginning a Journey Across the Universe: The Discovery of Extragalactic Neutrino Factories

Abstract

Abstract Neutrinos are the most elusive particles in the universe, capable of traveling nearly unimpeded across it. Despite the vast amount of data collected, a long-standing and unsolved issue is still the association of high-energy neutrinos with the astrophysical sources that originate them. Among the candidate sources of neutrinos, there are blazars, a class of extragalactic sources powered by supermassive black holes that feed highly relativistic jets, pointed toward Earth. Previous studies appear controversial, with several efforts claiming a tentative link between high-energy neutrino events and individual blazars, and others putting into question such relation. In this work, we show that blazars are unambiguously associated with high-energy astrophysical neutrinos at an unprecedented level of confidence, i.e., a chance probability of 6 × 10−7. Our statistical analysis provides the observational evidence that blazars are astrophysical neutrino factories and hence, extragalactic cosmic-ray accelerators.