Finds that most eclipsing binaries with short orbital periods are circular, suggesting incorrect interpretations in data.
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 dozens of systems have been published supposedly having orbital periods shorter than 1 day, and were also published 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% 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-day period limit, while the star TIC 1190662 with orbital period of about 0.888 days have surprisingly large value of eccentricity about 0.21.
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Zasche et al. (2026) studied this question.
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