Understanding the outbursts in young low mass stars

Young low mass stars have been observed to undergo outbursts of magnitude varying from 2 to 6 in optical. These outbursts lasting for few months to decades are very short compared to millions of years a typical low mass star spends in its formation and disc accretion stage. Hence, these events are extremely rare to observe. We have about a dozen of these outbursts reported in last century. These episodic outbursts due to sudden increase in accretion from the disc on to the star, could explain many observed features like knots in outflows and the anomaly of mismatch in mass infall rate from envelope to disc and disc to star, known as "luminosity problem". Every low mass star is estimated to go through these outbursts ~50 times in its formation stage, making it crucial to understand early stages of disc evolution and planet formation.
I will be presenting our ~4.5 years of continuous monitoring of one of these outburst sources known as V1647 Orionis. This object's properties blur the differences between the empirically classified two families of outburst categories. From our long term observations we were able to constrain different existing physical models (Bell & Lin 1994 and Zhu et al. 2008) which try to explain the episodic accretion events.