This week we are looking at the I-Band light curve of the young star T Ori. This is a slightly massive (a few solar masses) young star in the Orion nebula.
We can see that the star has dimming events at irregular intervals. We do not show the data in the other filters, as they are too bright (brighter than 10mag) and hence are partly saturated. You can see that despite the star being very bright, the uncertainties of the photometry are quite large, between 5 and 10 percent. This is caused by the fact that there are not many such bright stars in the field and the ones that are, are mostly quite variable. Thus it is difficult to accurately calibrate the magnitudes.
We have looked at the star before in week 101 of this feature. In that post you can see that the star had these dimming events in the past and that its behaviour appears different in each year. It is an interesting one to study to see how the frequency of these events changes over time.