Starship Asterisk*

http://www.solstation.com/stars/sol.htm wrote:
<<After its birth some 4.6 billion years ago, the Sun had an extremely active magnetic field during its infancy, with gigantic dark star- or Sun-spots that sometimes covered its polar regions. Indeed, sometime after the tenuous gas of the Solar nebula began collapsing into the proto-Sun within its host molecular cloud, a strong magnetic field developed that was instrumental in transporting rotational energy away from its core region in bi-polar jets of gas so that centrifugal forces created by the nebula's collapse did not grow so much as to halt continuing gravitational contraction. Before Sol finished forming, around a tenth of the gas and dust around it may have been ejected by infalling through its accretion disk and then being blown out by bi-polar jets to produce two giant lobes of molecular gas, and bow shocks from the jets hitting the surrounding stellar nebula. Known as Herbig-Haro objects since their discovery in the early 1950s, these lobes typically extend a few light-years in length, have masses similar or larger than the developing star itself, and are moving apart at speeds of tens to a few hundred kilometers per second. Stretching for several light-years, such bi-polar jets may be driven at supersonic speeds by an intense magnetic field at the axis of rotation of an embryonic star less than a few hundred million years old.

The gas and dust moving outward carried angular momentum away from the developing Sun and allowed accretion to continue, but also churned up the surrounding nebula and so provided the necessary turbulence to slow down its collapse. Eventually, the supply of infalling matter ran out and shut down Sol's bi-polar jets. Subsequently, much of the surrounding gas and dust that remained around Sol was blown away, by the young star's radiation in T-Tauri winds after core nuclear fusion was turned on. >>

jnorris886 wrote:
The difference between brightness variations between the star and the nebula is due to the significant distance between them. Assuming that the star is the light source for itself and the nebula, the time difference between the variations can be easily calculated by dividing the distance between them by the speed of light.