Speaker
Description
The blazar TXS 0506+056 was the first astrophysical source to be associated with high-energy neutrinos, both temporally and spatially. This breakthrough followed the detection of a high-energy neutrino coincident with the blazar’s 2017 X-ray and gamma-ray flare. Additionally, IceCube has identified TXS 0506+056 as the second most prominent hotspot in the neutrino sky over 9.5 years of observations, hinting at a steady neutrino emission from the blazar. Recent studies propose that neutrinos from blazars may originate in a core region near the supermassive black hole, such as the AGN corona or the inner accretion flow. In this contribution, we explore this hypothesis in the context of physical scenarios for particle acceleration in the coronal region, taking into account that TXS 0506+056 is a masquerading BL Lac – a high-excitation quasar with hidden broad emission lines and a standard accretion disk. Using observationally informed estimates of the X-ray luminosity of the coronal region, we predict the neutrino and electromagnetic spectra expected from a putative corona, and assess their consistency with the observed multi-wavelength spectrum of the source. We find that the neutrino emission from the corona of TXS 0506+056 is too low for explaining the IceCube observations from this blazar, which in turn suggests that the blazar jet remains the preferred location for neutrino production.
