Recently, a high-energy neutrino event IceCube-170922A in the spatial and
temporal coincidence with the flaring gamma-ray blazar TXS 0506+056 was
reported. A neutrino outburst between September 2014 and March 2015 was
discovered in the same direction by a further investigation of 9.5 years of
IceCube data, while the blazar is in a quiescent state during the outburst with
a gamma-ray flux only about one-fifth of the neutrino flux. In this letter, we
propose the neutrino outburst originates from the interaction between a
relativistic jet and a dense gas cloud which may be formed via the tidally
disrupted envelope of a red giant being blown by the impact of the jet.
Gamma-ray photons and electron/positron pairs that are produced correspondingly
will induce electromagnetic cascades. Comptonization of the cascade emission
inside the cloud forms an X-ray photon field with Wien distribution. GeV flux
is suppressed due to the absorption by the Comptonized photon field and, as a
result, a hard spectrum above 10 GeV is formed. The gamma-ray spectrum
predicted in our model is consistent with the Fermi-LAT data of TXS 0506+056.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure
