A young, pre-main-sequence star still in the process of gravitational contraction and surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. These stars exhibit strong stellar winds, irregular brightness variations, and active accretion from their surrounding disk material.
Named after T Tauri, the prototype star in the constellation Taurus discovered to be variable in 1852. The classification was established in the 1940s when astronomers recognized these as a distinct class of young stellar objects associated with star-forming regions.
T Tauri stars are stellar nurseries where planets are born! These cosmic toddlers, less than 10 million years old, are surrounded by swirling disks of dust and gas that gradually clump together to form planets - we're literally watching solar systems like ours in their earliest stages of formation.
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