The Interaction Between a Pulsed Astrophysical Jet and Small-Scale Heterogeneous Media

TL;DR

This study uses 2D hydrodynamic simulations to investigate how small-scale inhomogeneities in the medium affect the propagation and deflection of pulsed astrophysical jets, providing insights into observed phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed simulation analysis of jet interactions with small clumps, revealing their impact on jet dynamics and observational signatures.

Findings

Clumps impede jet propagation and cause deflections.

Jet and vorticity behavior correlate with a dynamic filling function.

Results align with recent observations of Herbig-Haro objects.

Abstract

We have performed 2D hydrodynamic simulations of a pulsed astrophysical jet propagating through a medium that is populated with spherical inhomogeneities, or "clumps," which are smaller than the jet radius. The clumps are seen to affect the jet in several ways, such as impeding jet propagation and deflecting the jet off-axis. While there has been some debate as to the prevalence of these types of condensations in the ISM or in molecular clouds, the exploration of this region of parameter space nonetheless both shows the potential for these clumps to disrupt astrophysical jets and yields results which recover aspects of recent observations of Herbig-Haro objects. We find that the propagation of the jet and the vorticity induced in the clump/ambient medium correlate well with a "dynamic filling function" $f_d$ across all the simulations.