TESS Eclipsing Binary Stars. I. Short cadence observations of 4584 eclipsing binaries in Sectors 1-26

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive catalog of 4584 eclipsing binary stars observed by TESS, introducing a new morphology classification and analyzing statistical properties, completeness, and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a large, validated catalog of eclipsing binaries with a novel morphology classification method based on dimensionality reduction.

Findings

Identification of new eclipsing binary systems.

Development of a binary star morphology classification scheme.

Statistical analysis of the sample's properties and completeness.

Abstract

In this paper we present a catalog of 4584 eclipsing binaries observed during the first two years (26 sectors) of the TESS survey. We discuss selection criteria for eclipsing binary candidates, detection of hither-to unknown eclipsing systems, determination of the ephemerides, the validation and triage process, and the derivation of heuristic estimates for the ephemerides. Instead of keeping to the widely used discrete classes, we propose a binary star morphology classification based on a dimensionality reduction algorithm. Finally, we present statistical properties of the sample, we qualitatively estimate completeness, and discuss the results. The work presented here is organized and performed within the TESS Eclipsing Binary Working Group, an open group of professional and citizen scientists; we conclude by describing ongoing work and future goals for the group. The catalog is available from http://tessEBs.villanova.edu and from MAST.