(Excerpt from press release) A few stars are known to be associated with a sudden and violent "feeding" frenzy from inside their stellar nursery. When they gluttonize on the surrounding material, their visible light increases very suddenly and dramatically, by a factor of about a hundred. These sudden flareups in brightness are called "FU Orionis outbursts" because they were first discovered toward the star FU Orionis.
Not many stars are found to be associated with such outbursts — only a dozen out of thousands. However, astronomers speculate that all baby stars may experience such outbursts as part of their growth. The reason we only see FU Ori outbursts toward a few newborn stars is simply because they are relatively quiet most of the time.
Read the full press release from the Subaru Telescope
Read the pre-print paper on ArXiv
Circumstellar Disks of the Most Vigorously Accreting Young Stars
Authors: Hauyu Baobab Liu, Michihiro Takami, Tomoyuki Kudo, Jun Hashimoto, Ruobing Dong, Eduard I. Vorobyov, Tae-Soo Pyo, Misato Fukagawa, Motohide Tamura, Thomas Henning, Michael M. Dunham, Jennifer Karr, Nobuhiko Kusakabe, Toru Tsuribe