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Revealing the Two `Horns' of Taurus with GAIA DR2

We investigate the spatial properties of sources from the GAIA catalogue previously identified as being members of the Taurus star forming region and which appear in the Spitzer catalogue. We study an area of sky of 10x15 deg, centred on Right Ascension (2000.0) = 68.5 deg and Declination (2000.0)= 27.0 deg, this being an area surrounding the Taurus molecular cloud. We use data obtained from the GAIA DR2 release. By using an inversion of GAIA parallax measurements to obtain distance values and by defining limits to the proper motions of the Taurus moving group, we are able to show that there are substantial differences in depth within the Taurus complex. Our results suggest that the Taurus cloud has significant depth and that there are two main associations centred at ~130.6+/-0.7 pc and ~160.2+/-0.9 pc at 1σ. These two associations also have different proper motions, of 24.5+/-2.8 and 20.1+/-2.4 mas/yr respectively. We here label them the 'Two Horns' of Taurus.