ZTF18abukavn/AT2018gep: IceCube neutrino search
ATel #12062; Erik Blaufuss (UMD) on behalf of the IceCube collaboration
on 25 Sep 2018; 22:09 UT
Credential Certification: Erik Blaufuss (blaufuss@umd.edu)
Subjects: Neutrinos, Transient
The IceCube Collaboration (http://icecube.wisc.edu/) reports:
IceCube has performed a search for track-like muon neutrino events arriving from the position of AT2018gep/ZTF18abukavn (Ho et al. #12030) in the time range of one day prior to the first detection to the 24th of September (2018-09-08 04:00:00 UTC to 2018-09-24 14:00:00 UTC). Three neutrino track events are found in spatial coincidence with AT2018gep during this time period with a p-value of 0.038 (1.77 sigma) with respect to an atmospheric neutrino background only hypothesis. Accordingly, these three events would represent a time-integrated muon-neutrino flux normalization upper limit assuming an E^-2 spectrum (E^2 dN/dE) at the 90% CL of 9.7 x 10^-5 TeV cm^-2 for this observation period.
The detected neutrinos, consistent with the source location within the track uncertainties for these events (~2 degrees), arrived at:
2018-09-11 20:48:33 UTC (MJD 58372.867)
2018-09-19 17:19:50 UTC (MJD 58380.722)
2018-09-21 23:52:16 UTC (MJD 58382.995)
While these detected neutrinos do not represent a significant detection, their arrival times are of potential interest to the astronomical community.
The IceCube Neutrino Observatory is a cubic-kilometer neutrino detector operating at the geographic South Pole, Antarctica. The IceCube realtime alert point of contact can be reached at roc@icecube.wisc.edu.
