Identification, Classifications, and Absolute Properties of 773 Eclipsing Binaries Found in the TrES Survey

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematic pipeline to analyze photometric data, identifying and characterizing 773 eclipsing binaries, providing their physical properties, and highlighting specific interesting binary types for further study.

Contribution

The authors developed a minimal-interaction pipeline that analyzes large photometric datasets to identify and model eclipsing binaries, estimating their physical properties and categorizing interesting systems.

Findings

Identified 773 eclipsing binary systems from the TrES dataset.

Discovered 11 low-mass binary candidates relevant to stellar models.

Found 34 binaries with eccentric orbits and 20 with abnormal light curves.

Abstract

In recent years we have witnessed an explosion of photometric time-series data, collected for the purpose of finding a small number of rare sources, such as transiting extrasolar planets and gravitational microlenses. Once combed, these data are often set aside, and are not further searched for the many other variable sources that they undoubtedly contain. To this end, we describe a pipeline that is designed to systematically analyze such data, while requiring minimal user interaction. We ran our pipeline on a subset of the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey dataset, and used it to identify and model 773 eclipsing binary systems. For each system we conducted a joint analysis of its light curve, colors, and theoretical isochrones. This analysis provided us with estimates of the binary's absolute physical properties, including the masses and ages of their stellar components, as well as their physical separations and distances. We identified three types of eclipsing binaries that are of particular interest and merit further observations. The first category includes 11 low-mass candidates, which may assist current efforts to explain the discrepancies between the observation and the models of stars at the bottom of the main-sequence. The other two categories include 34 binaries with eccentric orbits, and 20 binaries with abnormal light curves. Finally, this uniform catalog enabled us to identify a number of relations that provide further constraints on binary population models and tidal circularization theory.