The Taurus dark cloud is one of the nearest active sites of low-mass star formation. The IRAS satellite has discovered numerous low-luminosity far-infrared sources in this cloud, some of which are completely invisible at optical wavelengths. There are several arguments suggesting that the invisible sources are low-mass protostars which are younger than T Tauri stars and powered by the accretion of infalling gas and dust (Adams, Lada, & Shu 1987; Beichman et al. 1986; Myers et al. 1987; Kenyon et al. 1990)Tamura et al. (1991) made a near-infrared imaging survey of a complete, flux-limited sample of cold IRAS sources in the Taurus dark cloud, of which 8 are optical T Tauri-like objects and 16 are optically invisible sources. They identified all 24 sources with near-infrared counterparts; one is entirely nebulous without a point-like source, and the others generally have an unresolved peak with or without an extended component at 2.2 µm 75 % of the 24 sample sources are associated with infrared/optical nebulosity about 1000 AU to 10000 AU in size. A number of the sources show a clear bipolar or monopolar morphology, suggestive of a close relation of the nebulosity with a bipolar mass outflow; the nebulosity is due to scattering of light from the central source by the dust associated with the mass outflow extending to the poles of a circumstellar dust disk.
A Near-Infrared Imaging Survey of the Lupus 3 Dark Cloud: A Modest Cluster of Low-Mass, Pre–Main-Sequence Stars