This paper addresses the slender laminar flow resulting from the discharge of a low-Mach-number hot gas jet of radius a and moderately large Reynolds number Rj into a cold atmosphere of the same gas. We give the boundary-layer solution for plane and round jets with very small values of the ambient-to-jet temperature ratio ? accounting for the temperature dependence of the viscosity and conductivity typical of real gases. It is seen that the leading-order description of the jet in the limit ? ? 0 exhibits a front-like structure, including a precisely defined separating boundary at which heat conduction and viscous shear stresses vanish in the first approximation, so that the temperature and axial velocity remain unperturbed outside the jet. Separate analyses are given for the jet discharging into a stagnant atmosphere, when the jet boundary is a conductive front, and for the jet discharging into a coflowing stream, when the jet boundary appears as a contact surface. We provide in particular the numerical description of the jet development region corresponding to axial distances of order Rja for buoyant and non-buoyant jets, as well as the self-similar solutions that emerge both in the near field and in the far field. In all cases considered, comparisons with numerical integrations of the boundary-layer problem for moderately small values of ? indicate that these front descriptions give excellent predictions for the temperature and velocity fields in the near-axis region.