The Monitor project: tracking the evolution of low mass and pre-main sequence stars

The Monitor project is a large-scale program of photometric and spectroscopic monitoring of young open clusters using telescopes at ESO and other observatories. Its primary goal is to detect and characterise new low-mass eclipsing binaries, and the first three detected systems are discussed here. We derive the masses and radii of the components of each system directly from the light and radial velocity curves, and compare them to the predictions of commonly used theoretical evolutionary models of low-mass stars.