Young Stars in Taurus: the K2 View

Young stars with circumstellar disks are highly variable sources on many timescales. Accretion, dust obscuration, and rotational modulation of stellar spots are thought to be the main contributors to this variability, although the physical drivers are not understood in detail. Over the past few years, space missions have returned exquisite light curves of young stars (YSOs) across the sky, enabling new analyses of their flux behavior from minute to several month timescales. The Kepler telescope’s K2 Mission contributed to this endeavor with observations of several star-forming regions, including Upper Scorpius, ρ Ophiuchus, the Lagoon Nebula, and Taurus. Here we present a newly processed set of light curves for all 100 disk-bearing stars observed during K2 Campaign 13 encompassing the ~1 Myr Taurus region. We apply statistical metrics to classify the morphology of each continuous 80-day light curve and ultimately correlate time domain behavior with stellar and circumstellar properties, including spectral type, disk evolutionary state, and multiplicity. We compare our results with those previously published for the older Upper Scorpius star formation region, finding that quasi-periodic obscuration events appear to become more common at slightly older age.