Interaction between a pulsating jet and a surrounding disk wind: A hydrodynamical perspective

Context. The molecular richness of fast protostellar jets within 20–100 au of their source, despite strong ultraviolet irradiation, remains a challenge for the models investigated so far. Aim. We aim to investigate the effect of interaction between a time-variable jet and a surrounding steady disk wind, to assess the possibility of jet chemical enrichement by the wind, and the characteristic signatures of such a configuration. Methods. We have constructed an analytic model of a jet bow shock driven into a surrounding slower disk wind in the thin shell approximation. The refilling of the post bow shock cavity from below by the disk wind is also studied. An extension of the model to the case of two or more successive internal working surfaces (IWS) is made. We then compared this analytic model with numerical simulations with and without a surrounding disk wind. Results. We find that at early times (of order the variability period), jet bow shocks travel in refilled pristine disk wind material, before interacting with the cocoon of older bow shocks. This opens the possibility of bow shock chemical enrichment (if the disk wind is molecular and dusty) and of probing the unperturbed disk wind structure near the jet base. Several distinctive signatures of the presence of a surrounding disk wind are identified, in the bow shock morphology and kinematics. Numerical simulations validate our analytical approach and further show that at large scale, the passage of many jet IWS inside a disk wind produces a stationary V-shaped cavity, closing down onto the axis at a finite distance from the source.