Artigo Revisado por pares

On the matter entrainment by stellar jets and the acceleration of molecular outflows

2000; EDP Sciences; Volume: 364; Linguagem: Inglês

ISSN

1432-0746

Autores

M. Micono, G. Bodo, S. Massaglia, P. Rossi, A. Ferrari,

Tópico(s)

Quantum Electrodynamics and Casimir Effect

Resumo

We study, by numerical simulations, the entrainment process in a supersonic, radiative jet flow, during the evolution of Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities, in the context of the the ac- celeration problem of molecular bipolar outflows observed in Giant Molecular Clouds. Our results show that a large fraction of the initial jet momentum can be transferred to the ambient medium by this process. We therefore analyze in detail the in- stability evolution and compare some of the main observational properties of molecular outflows with those of the entrained material that we observe in our simulations. In particular, we find a good agreement for the mass vs. velocity distribution and for the outflow collimation structure, especially when a light jet is moving into a denser ambient medium. This is probably the case for (obscured) optical jets driving powerful molecu- lar outflows in the denser environment of the inner regions of molecular clouds.

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