Fixed TESS response fits for TOI-4876.01 change the nearer star when the reference list changes in sector 64

We test the source of the 4.14 day signal assigned to TOI-4876.01 with public SPOC two-minute data from TESS sectors 63, 64, 90, and 99. This is a test of a known contamination case. Panahi et al. (2022) already classified it as a background eclipsing binary. The target and a nearby Gaia binary are 6.579 arcseconds apart. We fit images of light lost during each eclipse with a fixed TESS pixel response. We compare the fitted position with the target and binary. In sector 64, changing the static-image reference list from 42 stars at G < 16 to 70 stars at G < 16.5 reverses the distance ranking. The position projection changes from 0.977 to 0.361, where zero is the target, one is the binary, and 0.5 gives equal distances. The main conditional 95% range is 0.420 to 1.545. The reversal remains across seven optimizer starts per list and when the known binary is added to both lists. In sectors 63 and 90, the fits lie nearer the binary but beyond it. In sector 99, the conditional range includes both stars. Thus, these fixed-response tests do not give one stable source choice. Twenty-one accepted eclipse times span 1055 days. They give a linear period of 4.13810596 days, with a within-sector event-resample standard deviation of 0.00003327 day. Three timing models on the same events span 2.58 seconds. The data do not establish a period change or a new planet. We release the event images, times, model controls, reduced inputs, source records, and code for an offline repeat.

TOI-4876.01 · TIC 458300989 · TESS · Gaia DR3 · eclipsing binary · image registration · source position · ephemeris · public data