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AGN Jet Mass Loading and Truncation by Stellar Winds
Active Galactic Nuclei can produce extremely powerful jets. While tightly
collimated, the scale of these jets and the stellar density at galactic centers
implies that there will be many jet/star interactions, which can mass-load the
jet through stellar winds. Previous work employed modest wind mass outflow
rates, but this does not apply when mass loading is provided by a small number
of high mass-loss stars. We construct a framework for jet mass-loading by
stellar winds for a broader spectrum of wind mass-loss rates than has been
previously considered. Given the observed stellar mass distributions in
galactic centers, we find that even highly efficient (0.1 Eddington luminosity)
jets from supermassive black holes of masses M_{BH} \la 10^4M_{\odot} are
rapidly mass loaded and quenched by stellar winds. For , the quenching length of highly efficient jets
is independent of the jet's mechanical luminosity. Stellar wind mass-loading is
unable to quench efficient jets from more massive engines, but can account for
the observed truncation of the inefficient M87 jet, and implies a baryon
dominated composition on scales \ga 2 kpc therein even if the jet is
initially pair plasma dominated.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure
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