2011MNRAS.416.2020K

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 change in the distance is the reflex motion about the system's barycentre due to the gravitational influence of one or more additional bodies. We analyse 5032 eclipsing contact (EC) and eclipsing detached (ED) binaries from the All Sky Automated Survey (ASAS) catalogue to detect variations in the times of eclipses which possibly 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 the ASAS, we use a best-fitting trigonometric series representing the light curve of a given EC or ED. Subsequently, an observed minus calculated (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 detect in O-C diagrams correspond to a linear period change. Three of the O-C diagrams show evidence of more than one complete LTE orbit. For these objects we obtain 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.