Speaker
Description
Astrophysical neutrinos at hundreds of TeV are expected to originate in
hadronic interactions, but their sources are still unknown. The chance of
identifying the emitting objects can be improved by a rapid electromagnetic
follow-up of neutrino events. Here, the MAGIC telescopes play a relevant role in
identifying very high energy (>100 GeV) γ-ray counterparts. This is achieved by
responding to different types of neutrino alerts issued by the IceCube alert
system. Thanks to this program, a very high energy neutrino detected by
IceCube was found to be spatially coincident with the blazar TXS 0506+056
and in time coincidence with a flare of this source. This is so far the only
observation with a chance coincidence probability rejected at the 3σ level,
suggesting blazars as candidate neutrino emitters.
In this talk a description of MAGIC observation strategy in response to IceCube
alerts will be given, together with a discussion on past follow-up, in particular
on the case of TXS 0506+056.
| Collaboration name | MAGIC Collaboration |
|---|
