A NEW ANALYSIS OF THE MOMENTUM AND MASS-LOSS RATES OF STELLAR JETS

A very important question in the theory of bipolar outflows from young stars is posed by the still not understood relation between molecular outflows and optical outflows (i.e., stellar jets and Herbig-Haro objects). In some past studies, estimates of mass and momentum rates associated with these outflows indicated that stellar jets have approximately 2 orders of magnitude smaller values for these parameters than the molecular outflows associated with the same sources. However, a reanalysis of observations of stellar jets in the light of new theoretical jet models yields values of mass and momentum rates comparable to the ones of molecular outflows. From this result one can tentatively speculate that stellar jets (or Herbig-Haro objects) and molecular outflows might be different manifestations of basically the same flow.