This week we have a sneaky preview of one of the figures in our next paper – HOYSXII. The paper has now an almost complete draft which we will sent out to the co-authors for comments soon. The work is focusing on determining how likely it is that different samples of YSO light curves are drawn from the same population of sources. In essence, this will allow us to quantify how well a set of model light curves fits the variability statistics found in the HOYS light curves, or a selected sub-set of these.
In the plot above we show the results for a very simplistic (and obviously not accurate) model. This model uses sine wave like light curves of varying amplitudes and periods and compares their variability statistics to a sample of YSO light curves. In this case we selected all variable light curves from Classical T-Tauri stars in the HOYS sample – there are 550 of these. The numbers in the plot basically tell you the probability that these sort of model light curves do have the same variability statistics.
As we have seen many times, YSO light curves are usually not looking like a sine wave, though some do. Hence, this model is obviously not right and the results show this as well. For almost all periods and amplitudes the probabilities that these models match the data are extremely low. More details of this will be in the paper …. stay tuned.