Program: GS-2022B-DD-201

Title:Scrutinizing extragalactic neutrino factories with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph GMOS-S
PI:Alessandra Azzollini
Co-I(s): Marco Ajello, Stefano Marchesi, Alexis Coleiro, Sara Buson

Abstract

High-energy neutrinos detected by the IceCube Observatory are the key to decipher the origin of comics rays. After more than a century-old debate, the population of astrophysical sources originating the high-energy neutrinos has been confidently identified. A small subset of 10 extragalactic objects belonging to the blazars class has been put forward as highly-likely neutrino emitters. These sources promise to be a key laboratory for models of cosmic rays acceleration and black hole physics. For those with an optical spectrum available from the literature, we have yet collected the information from the archives to investigate their fundamental properties. However, for three of them the optical/near-infrared spectrum is not available from the literature. We propose GMOS observations to obtain a dataset that will be crucial to provide a complete overview of neutrino-emitter blazars. The data proposed here will allow us to pinpoint the intrinsic properties that make this set of blazars special among the whole blazar population.