Reflection Jets and Collimation of Radio Sources

Abstract

It has become increasingly clear to me as I listened to the papers presented at this workshop that in discussing astrophysical jets we are talking not only about apples and oranges, but also about pears and peaches (and perhaps an occasional lemon), as the large observational material presented was not pointing towards one single phenomenon. We cannot, therefore, reasonably expect to explain the observations in terms of one single picture. With this in mind I would like to add here one more hypothesis aimed at a description of only a certain class of jets in extended radio sources by discussing hydrodynamics of jets formed by discrete portions of material ejected from the parent galaxy through a channel and reflected back into it as a result of an encounter with the material accumulated at the end of the channel.