Are there really some eccentric eclipsing binaries having orbital periods below 1 d?
Abstract
The stellar binary systems are classical tools for studying dynamics, and tidal circularization is one of the processes taking place in these. During the last few years, several dozen systems have been published supposedly having orbital periods shorter than 1 d, and have also been published as having eccentric orbits. Such a configuration is due to their spatial closeness, and the tides very improbable. Therefore, we performed a thorough analysis of all these eclipsing binaries (>140), showing that the vast majority of the published systems (> 98%) are in fact circular. Especially, the eclipsing binaries identified and published from the Gaia DR3 catalogue suffer from a lack of data, and about 50 per cent had incorrectly derived periods. This mostly incorrect identification of the eccentric orbits is due to automatic pipelines and routines running without human checking/validating, and also due to the large number of systems with (evolving) spots on the surfaces of either of the stars. Only two eccentric orbits were found below the 1-d period limit, while the star TIC 1190662 with an orbital period of about 0.888 d has a surprisingly large value of eccentricity about 0.21.
Versions
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BibTeX
@misc{zasche2026there,
title = {{Are there really some eccentric eclipsing binaries having orbital periods below 1 d?}},
author = {P. Zasche and M. Wolf},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.26036},
eprint = {2609.26036},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26036},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Are there really some eccentric eclipsing binaries having orbital periods below 1 d?
AU - P. Zasche
AU - M. Wolf
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/22
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.26036
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.26036
AB - The stellar binary systems are classical tools for studying dynamics, and tidal circularization is one of the processes taking place in these. During the last few years, several dozen systems have been published supposedly having orbital periods shorter than 1 d, and have also been published as having eccentric orbits. Such a configuration is due to their spatial closeness, and the tides very improbable. Therefore, we performed a thorough analysis of all these eclipsing binaries (>140), showing that the vast majority of the published systems (> 98%) are in fact circular. Especially, the eclipsing binaries identified and published from the Gaia DR3 catalogue suffer from a lack of data, and about 50 per cent had incorrectly derived periods. This mostly incorrect identification of the eccentric orbits is due to automatic pipelines and routines running without human checking/validating, and also due to the large number of systems with (evolving) spots on the surfaces of either of the stars. Only two eccentric orbits were found below the 1-d period limit, while the star TIC 1190662 with an orbital period of about 0.888 d has a surprisingly large value of eccentricity about 0.21.
ER -