Symmetric fits to 86 TESS eclipses give a 16.6-second differential timing wave for TIC 142979644 at 534.96 days

A common light travel delay must follow one time law for both eclipse types in a binary star. We test the reported 534.96-day timing pattern of TIC 142979644 with direct fits to public TESS flux from 2019 to 2024. Symmetric spline fits give 43 primary and 43 secondary centers in eight sectors. Their primary minus secondary sine and cosine coefficient vector has an amplitude of 16.61 seconds. Separate waves reduce chi-square by 50.19 for two added parameters. A whole-sequence residual-shift error check gives 16.03 seconds and a score decrease of 43.05. The tested SAP shape and baseline choices give 15.5 to 16.6 seconds. All timing models retain excess scatter. Sixteen sector means give an 11.17-second difference and a score decrease of 14.81. When one unknown error scale is allowed, the conditional F-test tail changes from 0.000032 for individual times to 0.224 for sector means. Thus the strength of the common-wave test depends on the noise treatment. Recovery controls give errors below 0.003 second for 96 known shifts in symmetric profiles. For 640 nonlinear residual refits, timing standard deviations agree with the linear response within 6 percent. This is a retrospective measurement test. It does not establish a planet, exclude a companion, or identify a physical cause. The package preserves eight original flux files, 514 method fits, all event decisions, archive provenance, source code, controls, figures, and offline reproduction instructions. Archive extension checksum failures remain documented and unresolved.

TIC 142979644 · TESS · eclipsing binaries · eclipse timing · circumbinary companions · light travel time · correlated noise · reproducible astronomy