Introduction
A high-energy neutrino event detected by IceCube on 22 September 2017 was coincident in direction and time with a gamma-ray flare from the blazar TXS 0506+056. The analysis of this association was reported in Science (DOI:10.1126/science.aat1378). Prompted by this association, IceCube investigated 9.5 years of data recorded in the direction of this blazar to search for additional evidence of neutrino emission. The data consisted of six existing neutrino data samples used for point source searches, from 5 April 2008 until 31 October 2017. An excess of high-energy neutrino events with respect to atmospheric backgrounds at the coordinates of TXS 0506+056 was found between September 2014 and March 2015. Allowing for time-variable flux, this constituted 3.5sigma evidence for neutrino emission from the direction of TXS 0506+056, independent of and prior to the 2017 flaring episode.
+ Info “Neutrino emission from the direction of the blazar TXS 0506+056 prior to the IceCube-170922A alert,” IceCube Collaboration: M.G. Aartsen et al. Science 361. DOI: 10.1126/science.aat2890
Data release
Suggested citation for this dataset:
IceCube Collaboration (2018): IceCube data from 2008 to 2017 related to analysis of TXS 0506+056. Dataset. DOI:10.21234/B4QG92
Click here to download (31KB, .zip)
Included in the download are the following files:
list_of_samples.txt – the sample names, their start and end times, and mean number of data events per square degree at the declination of TXS 0506+056.
Then for each sample, the following two files:
Aeff_[sample-name].txt – the effective area for a muon neutrino flux from the declination of TXS 0506+056 (specifically, a flux that is 50% muon neutrino and 50% muon anti-neutrino). The effective area is provided in binned steps of 0.1 in log10 of neutrino energy.
events_[sample-name].txt – all data events within 3 degrees of the r.a. and dec. of TXS 0506+056. For each event, the following information is given in each column:
- MJD – Modified Julian Day and fraction of day (< 1 second precision)
- Reconstructed right ascension and declination coordinates (J2000, degrees)
- Angular uncertainty (degrees) – specifically, this is the value of sigma used in the Gaussian expression for the point spread function in the likelihood.
- log10(Ereco) – the logarithm of the reconstructed muon energy (Muon Energy Proxy). Note that different energy reconstructions were applied for different samples, and furthermore the Ereco values correspond to units of GeV in an approximate way only. Individual muon energy uncertainty estimates are not calculated for the events in these samples, nor are individual neutrino energies estimated. See the Supplementary Materials section of the paper for more discussion of the muon energy proxies.
Update (October 22, 2019): The following two files have been included in the zip file associated with this data:
Fig_S4_tabulated.txt and Fig_S5_tabulated.txt – text files of the numerical values corresponding to the plots in Figures S4 and S5 of the Supplementary Materials.
Related release: IceCube catalog of alert events up through Icecube-170922A
For any questions about this data release, please write to data@icecube.wisc.edu.