The Outburst of the Young Star Gaia19bey

TL;DR

This paper documents a detailed multi-wavelength study of Gaia19bey's 4-year outburst, revealing its evolutionary state, spectral evolution, and outflow characteristics, contributing new insights into young stellar object outbursts.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive photometric and spectroscopic analysis of Gaia19bey's outburst, highlighting its intermediate duration and spectral evolution, and characterizing its outflow morphology.

Findings

Outburst lasted approximately 4 years, longer than typical EXors.

Spectral evolution shows cessation of magnetospheric accretion activity.

H2 emission indicates an outflow cavity, but no large-scale jet detected.

Abstract

We report photometry and spectroscopy of the outburst of the young stellar object Gaia19bey. We have established the outburst light curve with archival Gaia G, ATLAS Orange, ZTF r-band and Pan-STARRS rizy-filter photometry, showing an outburst of approximately 4 years duration, longer than typical EXors but shorter than FUors. Its pre-outburst SED shows a flat far-infrared spectrum, confirming the early evolutionary state of Gaia19bey and its similarity to other deeply embedded young stars experiencing outbursts. A lower limit to the peak outburst luminosity is approximately 182 L_sun at an assumed distance of 1.4 kpc, the minimum plausible distance. Infrared and optical spectroscopy near maximum light showed an emission line spectrum, including HI lines, strong red CaII emission, other metal emission lines, infrared CO bandhead emission, and a strong infrared continuum. Towards the end of the outburst, the emission lines have all but disappeared and the spectrum has changed into an almost pure continuum spectrum. This indicates a cessation of magnetospheric accretion activity. The near-infrared colors have become redder as Gaia19bey has faded, indicating a cooling of the continuum component. Near the end of the outburst, the only remaining strong emission lines are forbidden shock-excited emission lines. Adaptive optics integral field spectroscopy shows the H_2 1--0 S(1) emission with the morphology of an outflow cavity and the extended emission in the [FeII] line at 1644 nm with the morphology of an edge-on disk. However, we do not detect any large-scale jet from Gaia19bey.