Abstract
Tidally forced apsidal motion in eccentric eclipsing binaries is a key observable of stellar structure studies, and may serve as important probe for different tidal dissipation theories. There are, however, alternative physical processes which result in additional contributions to the observed apsidal motion. Here we mainly concentrate on the perturbing effect of a third, distant stellar companion, forming a hierarchical triple system with the eclipsing pair. First we discuss the mathematical form of the combined third body and tidally forced apsidal motions, and its observational aspects. Then we present a brief description of an eclipse timing variation study (based on the above mentioned analytical formulae) of 26 Kepler spacecraft-discovered 3-rd body perturbation-dominated compact hierarchical triples.
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