Radio Pulsar Style Timing of Eclipsing Binary Stars from the ASAS Catalogue

TL;DR

This study applies radio pulsar timing techniques to analyze eclipsing binary stars from the ASAS catalogue, detecting light-time effect variations indicative of additional bodies in the systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of pulsar timing methods to photometric data for identifying orbital variations in binary stars.

Findings

Detected LTE-induced eclipse timing variations in several binaries.

Most variations correspond to linear period changes.

Preliminary orbital solutions obtained for systems with multiple LTE-orbits.

Abstract

The Light-Time Effect (LTE) is observed whenever the distance between the observer and any kind of periodic event changes in time. The usual cause of this distance change is the reflex motion about the system's barycenter due to the gravitational influence of one or more additional bodies. We analyze 5032 eclipsing contact (EC) and detached (ED) binaries from the All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) catalogue to detect variations in the times of eclipses which possible can be due to the LTE effect. To this end we use an approach known from the radio pulsar timing where a template radio pulse of a pulsar is used as a reference to measure the times of arrivals of the collected pulses. In our analysis as a template for a photometric time series from ASAS, we use a best-fitting trigonometric series representing the light curve of a given EC or ED. Subsequently, an O-C diagram is built by comparing the template light curve with light curves obtained from subsets of a given time series. Most of the variations we detected in O-Cs correspond to a linear period change. Three show evidence of more than one complete LTE-orbit. For these objects we obtained preliminary orbital solutions. Our results demonstrate that the timing analysis employed in radio pulsar timing can be effectively used to study large data sets from photometric surveys.