Causality and stability of cosmic jets

Abstract

In stark contrast to their laboratory and terrestrial counterparts, the cosmic jets appear to be very stable. 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, the total loss of causal connectivity occurs, when the power index k>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 unmagnetized jets. In order to verify it, we have carried out numerical simulations of moderately magnetized and moderately relativistic jets. Their 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 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.