No Arabic abstract
Jets are observed in young stellar objects, X-ray sources, active galactic nuclei (AGN). The mechanisms of jet formation may be divided in regular, acting continuously for a long time, and explosive ones. Continuous mechanisms are related with electrodynamics and radiation pressure acceleration, hydrodynamical acceleration in the nozzle inside a thick disk, acceleration by relativistic beam of particles. Explosive jet formation is connected with supernovae, gamma ray bursts and explosive events in galactic nuclei. Mechanisms of jet collimation may be connected with magnetic confinement, or a pressure of external gas. Explosive formation of jets in the laboratory is modeled in the experiments with powerful laser beam, and plasma focus.
The results of MHD numerical simulations of the formation and development of magnetized jets are presented. Similarity criteria for comparisons of the results of laboratory laser experiments and numerical simulations of astrophysical jets are discussed. The results of laboratory simulations of jets generated in experiments at the Neodim laser installation are presented.
The use of Z-pinch facilities makes it possible to carry out well-controlled and diagnosable laboratory experiments to study laboratory jets with scaling parameters close to those of the jets from young stars. This makes it possible to observe processes that are inaccessible to astronomical observations. Such experiments are carried out at the PF-3 facility (plasma focus, Kurchatov Institute), in which the emitted plasma emission propagates along the drift chamber through the environment at a distance of one meter. The paper presents the results of experiments with helium, in which a successive release of two ejections was observed. An analysis of these results suggests that after the passage of the first supersonic ejection, a region with a low concentration is formed behind it, the so-called vacuum trace, due to which the subsequent ejection practically does not experience environmental resistance and propagates being collimated. The numerical modeling of the propagation of two ejections presented in the paper confirms this point of view. Using scaling laws and appropriate numerical simulations of astrophysical ejections, it is shown that this effect can also be significant for the jets of young stars.
Collimated outflows (jets) are ubiquitous in the universe appearing around sources as diverse as protostars and extragalactic supermassive blackholes. Jets are thought to be magnetically collimated, and launched from a magnetized accretion disk surrounding a compact gravitating object. We have developed the first laboratory experiments to address time-dependent, episodic phenomena relevant to the poorly understood jet acceleration and collimation region. The experimental results show the periodic ejections of magnetic bubbles naturally evolving into a heterogeneous jet propagating inside a channel made of self-collimated magnetic cavities. The results provide a unique view of the possible transition from a relatively steady-state jet launching to the observed highly structured outflows.
The giant planet atmospheres exhibit alternating prograde (eastward) and retrograde (westward) jets of different speeds and widths, with an equatorial jet that is prograde on Jupiter and Saturn and retrograde on Uranus and Neptune. The jets are variously thought to be driven by differential radiative heating of the upper atmosphere or by intrinsic heat fluxes emanating from the deep interior. But existing models cannot account for the different flow configurations on the giant planets in an energetically consistent manner. Here a three-dimensional general circulation model is used to show that the different flow configurations can be reproduced by mechanisms universal across the giant planets if differences in their radiative heating and intrinsic heat fluxes are taken into account. Whether the equatorial jet is prograde or retrograde depends on whether the deep intrinsic heat fluxes are strong enough that convection penetrates into the upper troposphere and generates strong equatorial Rossby waves there. Prograde equatorial jets result if convective Rossby wave generation is strong and low-latitude angular momentum flux divergence owing to baroclinic eddies generated off the equator is sufficiently weak (Jupiter and Saturn). Retrograde equatorial jets result if either convective Rossby wave generation is weak or absent (Uranus) or low-latitude angular momentum flux divergence owing to baroclinic eddies is sufficiently strong (Neptune). The different speeds and widths of the off-equatorial jets depend, among other factors, on the differential radiative heating of the atmosphere and the altitude of the jets, which are vertically sheared. The simulations have closed energy and angular momentum balances that are consistent with observations of the giant planets.
(abridged) Significant progress has been made in the last years in the understanding of the jet formation mechanism through a combination of numerical simulations and analytical MHD models for outflows characterized by the symmetry of self-similarity. In a previous article we introduced models of truncated jets from disks, i.e. evolved in time numerical simulations based on a radially self-similar MHD solution, but including the effects of a finite radius of the jet-emitting disk and thus the outflow. These models need now to be compared with available observational data. A direct comparison of the results of combined analytical theoretical models and numerical simulations with observations has not been performed as yet. In order to compare our models with observed jet widths inferred from recent optical images taken with HST and AO observations, we use a new set of tools to create emission maps in different forbidden lines, from which we determine the jet width as the FWHM of the emission. It is shown that the untruncated analytical disk outflow solution considered here cannot fit the small jet widths inferred by observations of several jets. Various truncated disk-wind models are examined, whose extracted jet widths range from higher to lower values compared to the observations. Thus we can fit the observed range of jet widths by tuning our models. We conclude that truncation is necessary to reproduce the observed jet widths and our simulations limit the possible range of truncation radii. We infer that the truncation radius, which is the radius on the disk mid-plane where the jet-emitting disk switches to a standard disk, must be between around 0.1 up to about 1 AU in the observed sample for the considered disk-wind solution. One disk-wind simulation with an inner truncation radius at about 0.11 AU also shows potential for reproducing the observations, but a parameter study is needed.