The star appears to be accreting from a protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, oriented face-on to Earth, which has been resolved in images from the ALMA observatory.

In December 2007, a team led by Johny Setiawan of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany announced discovery of a planet orbiting TW Hydrae, dubbed "TW Hydrae b" with a minimum mass around 1.2 Jupiter masses, a period of 3.56 days, and an orbital radius of 0.04 astronomical units (inside the inner rim of the protoplanetary disk).

Instead, the data was better modelled by starspots on TW Hydrae's surface passing in and out of view as the star rotates.

[15] Similar wavelength-dependent radial velocity variations, also caused by starspots, have been detected on other T Tauri stars.

Previously this gap was associated with the formation of a super-earth and modelling of the outflow velocity, the researchers estimate a mass of about 4 earth-masses.