Automatic Detection of Accretion Bursts in Young Stellar Objects: a New Algorithm for Long--Term Sky Surveys

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new algorithm designed to automatically detect accretion bursts, especially EXors-like events, in the light curves of young stellar objects from large sky surveys.

Contribution

The paper presents a heuristic pipeline for identifying irregular accretion bursts in young stars, tailored for long-term sky survey data, and validates it against known EXors objects.

Findings

Effective detection of accretion bursts in simulated and real data

Successful identification of known EXors in test datasets

Potential for large-scale automated monitoring of young stellar objects

Abstract

Young stellar objects in their pre-main sequence phase are characterized by irregular changes in brightness, generally attributed to an increase of the mass accretion rate due to various kind of instabilities occurring in the circumstellar disk. In the era of large surveys aimed to monitor the sky, we present a pipeline to detect irregular bursts, in particular EXors-like ( EX Lupi type eruptive variables), in the light curves. The procedure follows a heuristic approach and is tested against the light curves already collected for a few objects presently recognized as bona fide or candidate EXors.