Byproducts of the University of New South Wales Extrasolar Planet Search

The University of New South Wales is undertaking a search for transiting extrasolar planets using the Automated Patrol Telescope (APT) at Siding Spring Observatory (SSO), Australia (Hidas et al. 2005). Many varieties of variable stellar phenomena will be found among the high precision lightcurves generated, including eclipsing and contact binaries, and numerous classes of variable stars (Christiansen et al. 2006). Eclipsing low-mass binary stars are extremely valuable for constraining theoretical models of star formation due to the precise constraints on the masses and radii of the components. We present here lightcurves of three eclipsing binary systems with low mass components — a K-K star system, a G-M star system, and a potential G-brown dwarf system which has now been re-classified as a probable blended system.