Abstract
The authors study a model in which the filamentary structure observed in jets and lobes of extended extragalactic radio sources is produced by thermal instabilities driven by the synchrotron-inverse-Compton losses of the expanding plasma assumed to have two gas components (a thermal and a relativistic particle component). The application of the model to the Cen A jet showed that condensations with nonlinear density contrasts ρp/ρo ≈ 2 - 8 are formed and appear to be sufficient to explain the observed bright filaments, where ρp (ρo) is the density at the perturbed (ambient) region.
