Professor Shantanu Basu and longtime colleague Eduard Vorobyov of the University of Vienna had in 2006 developed a gravitational instability and fragmentation model which predicts stellar accretion outbursts on time scales of hundreds of years or less.  Other models of the early life of stars predict events occurring at much larger time scales, on the order of thousands of years.

A recently observed short term ( ~ 40 years) accretion burst of the young star V346 Normae will certainly have astronomy community revisiting the Basu-Vorobyov model.   This is very exciting news indeed.

[newly published paper (pdf)]