The formation and stability of a Blandford-Rees (BR) twin exhaust jet (as observed in quasars, radio galaxies, and SS 433) is investigated, and a formula for relating jet luminosity to the internal energy of the confining cloud is developed. A de Laval nozzle is found to form hydrodynamically in a flat bottomed gravitational potential, remaining globally stable over a luminosity range of about 40, for a fixed confining gas pressure. Global Rayleigh-Taylor instability is observed, limiting the formation of high-luminosity jets, with instability to finite-amplitude Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) pinching off KH molecules, rather than destroying nozzle structure. Hydrodynamic calculations to determine if the jet can form and remain stable are compared with steady state analytical work of BR (1974) and dynamical calculations of the jet boundary by Wiita (1978).
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Norman et al. (1981) studied this question.