Three-dimensional relativistic MHD simulations of active galactic nuclei jets: magnetic kink instability and Fanaroff–Riley dichotomy

By A. Tchekhovskoy, O. Bromberg. 2015

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Energy deposition by active galactic nuclei jets into the ambient medium can affect galaxy formation and evolution, the cooling of gas flows at the centres of galaxy clusters, and the growth of the supermassive black holes. However, the processes that couple jet power to the ambient medium and determine jet morphology are poorly understood. For instance, there is no agreement on the cause of the well-known Fanaroff-Riley (FR) morphological dichotomy of jets, with FRI jets being shorter and less stable than FRII jets. We carry out global 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations of relativistic jets propagating through the ambient medium. We show that the flat density profiles of galactic cores slow down and collimate the jets, making them susceptible to the 3D magnetic kink instability. We obtain a critical power, which depends on the galaxy core mass and radius, below which jets become kink-unstable within the core, stall, and inflate cavities filled with relativistically-hot plasma. Jets above the critical power stably escape the core and form powerful backflows. Thus, the kink instability controls the jet morphology and can lead to the FR dichotomy. The model-predicted dependence of the critical power on the galaxy optical luminosity agrees well with observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ca43d6cf8e0bce5cee26e72751871ee71f3d5a8f

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Citations in the corpus

Non-thermal particle acceleration in collisionless relativistic electron-proton reconnection (2016, background): “Jet acceleration can be facilitated by dissipation of magnetic energy, e.g., through reconnection triggered by current-driven instabilities (Begelman 1998; Giannios & Spruit 2006; Tchekhovskoy & Bromberg 2016; Sironi et al. 2015).”
A Global Model for Circumgalactic and Cluster-core Precipitation (2016, background): “It is therefore plausible that reducing the density of the isentropic zone reduces the fraction f0 of feedback energy deposited there (see, for example, the recent simulations by Tchekhovskoy & Bromberg 2016).”
Formation of precessing jets by tilted black hole discs in 3D general relativistic MHD simulations (2017, background): “Together with the jet wobbling due to magnetic instabilities (Tchekhovskoy & Bromberg 2016), this can provide an explanation for the unexpectedly high temperature of the intracluster medium, known as the cooling flow problem.”