MECI: A Method for Eclipsing Component Identification

We describe an automated method for assigning the most probable physicalparameters to the components of an eclipsing binary, using only its photometriclight curve and combined colors. With traditional methods, one attempts tooptimize a multi-parameter model over many iterations, so as to minimize thechi-squared value. We suggest an alternative method, where one selects pairs ofcoeval stars from a set of theoretical stellar models, and compares theirsimulated light curves and combined colors with the observations. This approachgreatly reduces the parameter space over which one needs to search, and allowsone to estimate the components' masses, radii and absolute magnitudes, withoutspectroscopic data. We have implemented this method in an automated programusing published theoretical isochrones and limb-darkening coefficients. Sinceit is easy to automate, this method lends itself to systematic analyses ofdatasets consisting of photometric time series of large numbers of stars, suchas those produced by OGLE, MACHO, TrES, HAT, and many others surveys.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Ap