Are both BL lacs and pulsar wind nebulae the astrophysical counterparts of IceCube neutrino events?

Abstract

IceCube has recently reported the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin, opening up the PeV (1015 eV) sky. Because of their large positional uncertainties, these events have not yet been associated to any astrophysical source. We have found plausible astronomical counterparts in the GeV-TeV bands by looking for sources in the available large area high-energy γ-ray catalogues within the error circles of the IceCube events. We then built the spectral energy distribution of these sources and compared it with the energy and flux of the corresponding neutrino. Likely counterparts include mostly BL Lacs and two Galactic pulsar wind nebulae. On the one hand many objects, including the starburst galaxy NGC 253 and Centaurus A, despite being spatially coincident with neutrino events, are too weak to be reconciled with the neutrino flux. On the other hand, various GeV powerful objects cannot be assessed as possible counterparts due to their lack of TeV data. The definitive association between high-energy astrophysical neutrinos and our candidates will be significantly helped by new TeV observations, but will be confirmed or disproved only by further IceCube data. Either way, this will have momentous implications for blazar jets, high-energy astrophysics, and cosmic ray and neutrino astronomy. © 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.