Automated analysis of eclipsing binary light curves - I. EBAS - a new Eclipsing Binary Automated Solver with EBOP

We present a new algorithm, Eclipsing Binary Automated Solver (EBAS), to analyse light curves of eclipsing binaries. The algorithm is designed to analyse large numbers of light curves, and is therefore based on the relatively fast EBOP code. To facilitate the search for the best solution, EBAS uses two parameter transformations. Instead of the radii of the two stellar components, EBAS uses the sum of radii and their ratio, while the inclination is transformed into the impact parameter. To replace human visual assessment, we introduce a new 'alarm' goodness-of-fit statistic that takes into account correlation between neighbouring residuals. We perform extensive tests and simulations that show that our algorithm converges well, finds a good set of parameters and provides reasonable error estimation.