TESS 2-min data from 2018 to 2026 show orbital-plane changes in a few of 2,145 detached eclipsing binaries; the eclipses of HD 93683 faded from 0.28 mag in 2002 to near zero in 2026

We searched 2,145 detached eclipsing binaries of the TESS 2-min catalog (Prsa et al. 2022) for eclipse changes between 2018-2020 and 2022-2026 (6,819 SPOC light curves). A third body can tilt the orbit of a binary and change the eclipse depth and width. We fit each sector with an empirical eclipse template (depth scale, width scale, time shift) and calibrated the noise with sector pairs that are one month apart. A depth change alone is not reliable: it occurs in 10.2 percent of the records across epochs and in 4.35 percent of one-month pairs, and most large depth changes follow changes of the SPOC crowding value. A depth change with a same-sign width change occurs in 1.3 percent of the records across epochs and in 0.05 percent of one-month pairs. Of 21 binaries flagged for lost eclipses, 17 still have the eclipse at a different phase (period error or timing variation). The O9V+B0V binary HD 93683 (P = 17.80 d) clearly lost its eclipses: ASAS-3 V depths are 0.28, 0.24 and 0.19 mag in 2002-2008, and TESS depths are 3.3 percent (2019), 1.0 percent (2023) and below 0.2 percent (2026). A twin-star model with a linear drift of the impact parameter fits the depths and predicts the measured width decrease without a new parameter. TYC 9179-1083-1 (TIC 300560295) has both eclipses deepening from 2.4 to 4.7 percent with a 15 percent wider eclipse, and Gaia DR3 gives an astrometric acceleration solution (RUWE 8.4). HD 221202 has a primary depth that fell from 6.5 to 2.3 percent by 2023. The pipeline recovers the predicted rise and fall of the eclipses of the known triple TIC 167692429 (Borkovits et al. 2020). Limitations: the screen uses 4 sectors per binary, the geometric model is simple, and we did not measure timing variations or radial velocities, so the third bodies are inferred and not detected directly.

eclipsing binaries · eclipse depth variation · nodal precession · hierarchical triples · TESS · ASAS-3 · Gaia DR3 · HD 93683 · HD 221202 · TIC 300560295 · TIC 167692429 · instrumental artifacts