Timing of Eclipses of Binary Stars from the ASAS Catalog
Abstract
Light was thought of as something infinite and transcendent till 1676 when Olaus Roemer carried out precise measurements of the times of eclipses of Jovian moons. Roemer's scrupulous observations led him to a qualitative conclusion that light travels at a finite speed, at the same time providing scientists with the basics of the Light-Time Effect (LTE). 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 present results of the analysis of 5032 eclipsing contact and detached binaries from the All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) catalogue for variations in the times of eclipses. 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. Most of the variations we detect in O--Cs correspond to a linear period change, but three show evidence of more than one complete LTE-orbit. For these objects we present 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. This is the prelude to the analysis of data gathered by the Solaris Project which aims at the search for circumbinary planets.
- Publication:
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AAS/Division for Extreme Solar Systems Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- September 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011ESS.....2.2302K