Algol eclipsing binaries in the Catalina Survey

However, the cadence of most current photometric surveys hinders the detection of EAs since the separation between observations is usually larger than the eclipse(s) duration and hence few measurements are found at the eclipses. Even when those objects are detected as variable, their periods can be missed if an appropriate oversampling factor is not used in the search tools.

In this paper, we apply this approach to find the periods of stars catalogued in the Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey (CRTS) as EAs having unknown period (EA_up_). As a result, the periods of ~56 per cent of them were determined. Eight objects were identified as low-mass binary systems and modelled with the Wilson & Devinney synthesis code combined with a Markov chain Monte Carlo optimization procedure.