Speaker
Description
For the past decade, the IceCube South Pole observatory has revealed indications of high-energy neutrino emission from blazars, powerful black-hole jets aligned with our line of sight. This supports the theoretical expectation that relativistic jets are efficient hadronic accelerators. However, neutrino data face limited statistics, and state-of-the-art source models suffer from critical degeneracies that limit their predictive power, preventing a confident identification of the neutrino sources. Paolo Padovani's work on the characterization and classification of blazars, including the first neutrino source association, has been central to this effort. In this talk, I will show how a collaboration started at ESO with Paolo Padovani has brought together optical, gamma-ray, neutrino, and theoretical expertise into a single interdisciplinary framework, where numerical source models are directly informed by observations. I will argue that this effort is transforming the role of source models from descriptive to predictive, and that this will be an essential tool for unveiling the most powerful cosmic sources in synergy with the upcoming generation of multi-messenger facilities.