Comparison of synthetic maps from truncated jet-formation models with YSO jet observations

¹ Dipartimento di Fisica Generale "A. Avogadro", Università degli Studi di Torino, via Pietro Giuria 1, 10125 Torino, Italy e-mail: matthias.stute@ph.unito.it
² IASA and Section of Astrophysics, Astronomy and Mechanics, Department of Physics, University of Athens, Panepistimiopolis, 157 84 Zografos, Athens, Greece
³ High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), Universität Stuttgart, 70550 Stuttgart, Germany
⁴ Max-Planck-Institut für Kernphysik, Postfach 10 39 80, 69029 Heidelberg, Germany
⁵ School of Cosmic Physics, Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, 31 Fitzwilliam Place, Dublin 2, Ireland

Received: 21 October 2008
Accepted: 16 April 2010

Abstract

Context. 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. Analytical radially self-similar models successfully describe disk-winds, but need several improvements. 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.

Aims. 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. This is our main goal.

Methods. In order to compare our models with observed jet widths inferred from recent optical images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and ground-based adaptive optics (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 full-width half-maximum of the emission.

Results. It is shown that the untruncated analytical disk outflow solution considered here cannot fit the small jet widths inferred by observations of several jets. Furthermore, 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.

Conclusions. 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.