Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Galaxy Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2011-05-31
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Galaxy Astrophysics
20 pages, 15 figures, accepted by ApJ
Scientific paper
In this paper we present a detailed numerical investigation of the hypothesis that a rotation of astrophysical jets can be caused by magnetohydrodynamic shocks in a helical magnetic field. Shock compression of the helical magnetic field results in a toroidal Lorentz force component which will accelerate the jet material in toroidal direction. This process transforms magnetic angular momentum (magnetic stress) carried along the jet into kinetic angular momentum (rotation). The mechanism proposed here only works in a helical magnetic field configuration. We demonstrate the feasibility of this mechanism by axisymmetric MHD simulations in 1.5D and 2.5D using the PLUTO code. In our setup the jet is injected into the ambient gas with zero kinetic angular momentum (no rotation). Different dynamical parameters for jet propagation are applied such as the jet internal Alfven Mach number and fast magnetosonic Mach number, the density contrast of jet to ambient medium, or the external sonic Mach number of the jet. The mechanism we suggest should work for a variety of jet applications, e.g. protostellar or extragalactic jets, and internal jet shocks (jet knots) or external shocks between the jet and ambient gas (entrainment). For typical parameter values for protostellar jets, the numerically derived rotation feature looks consistent with the observations, i.e. rotational velocities of 0.1-1 percent of the jet bulk velocity.
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