Causality and stability of cosmic jets

Abstract

In stark contrast to their laboratory and terrestrial counterparts, cosmic jets appear to be very stable. They are able to penetrate vast spaces, which exceed by up to a billion times the size of their central engines. We propose that the reason behind this remarkable property is the loss of causal connectivity across these jets, caused by their rapid expansion in response to fast decline of external pressure with the distance from the "jet engine". In atmospheres with power-law pressure distribution, p ext ∝ z −κ , the total loss of causal connectivity occurs, when κ > 2 -the steepness which is expected to be quite common for many astrophysical environments. This conclusion does not seem to depend on the physical nature of jets -it applies both to relativistic and non-relativistic flows, both magnetically-dominated and unmagnetised jets. In order to verify it, we have carried out numerical simulations of moderately magnetised and moderately relativistic jets. The results give strong support to our hypothesis and provide with valuable insights. In particular, we find that the z-pinched inner cores of magnetic jets expand slower than their envelopes and become susceptible to instabilities even when the whole jet is stable. This may result in local dissipation and emission without global disintegration of the flow. Cosmic jets may become globally unstable when they enter flat sections of external atmospheres. We propose that the Fanaroff-Riley morphological division of extragalactic radio sources into two classes is related to this issue. In particular, we argue that the low power FR-I jets become re-confined, causally connected and globally unstable on the scale of galactic X-ray coronas, whereas more powerful FR-II jets re-confine much further out, already on the scale of radio lobes, and remain largely intact until they terminate at hot spots. Using this idea, we derived the relationship between the critical jet power and the optical luminosity of the host galaxy, which is in a very good agreement with the observations.

Shocks in relativistic transverse stratified jets

“…This scenario is supported by theoretical arguments and numerical simulations addressing the physics of jet launching and collimation mechanisms (Sol et al 1989;Laing 1996;Bogovalov & Tsinganos 2001;Meier 2003;Meliani et al 2006a,b;Ferreira et al 2006a;Hardee 2007;Mizuno et al 2007;Aloy & Mimica 2008;Fendt 2009;Matsakos et al 2009;Porth & Komissarov 2015).…”

The nuclear properties and extended morphologies of powerful radio galaxies: the roles of host galaxy and environment

“…However the origin of the FR dichotomy might be related to a combination of environment and central engine properties (Wold, Lacy & Armus 2007). The FR dichotomy has also been investigated through hydrodynamical and magneto-hydrodynamical simulations that have argued the jet disruptions can emerge from Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (Perucho et al 2010), jet-stellar wind interactions (Wykes et al 2015) or magnetic instabilities (Porth & Komissarov 2015;Tchekhovskoy & bromberg 2015); these all favour the extrinsic scenario.…”

Hydrodynamical Simulations of Recollimation Shocks within Relativistic Astrophysical Jets

“…Magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations have also been used to produce jet simulations; these treat the magnetic field as dynamically important, e.g., [26][27][28]. However, the MHD approach requires extremely high resolutions to represent the disordered field that observations lead us to expect [29], resulting in a prohibitively large simulational run-time if MHD code were to be used in this work.…”