In November Maxwell Pollack and David Pauls presented their research on astrophysical jets at the Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting of the American Physical Society in San Francisco. They worked with Prof. Paul Wiita to compute hydrodynamical models for propagating jets of hot fluid moving at a very large fraction of the speed of light. These emerge from the vicinity of supermassive black holes and plow their way through the more dense gas found in the galaxies housing them. Their numerical work combined variations arising from jet instabilities with those coming from turbulence within the jets to provide a model for the changes in the brightness of active galaxies seen over periods from hours to decades. This work is being written up for publication.
