  Planets and brown dwarfs in close orbits will interact with their host stars,
as soon as the stars evolve to become red giants. However, the outcome of those
interactions is still unclear. Recently, several brown dwarfs have been
discovered orbiting hot subdwarf stars at very short orbital periods of 0.065 -
0.096 d. More than 8\% of the close hot subdwarf binaries might have
sub-stellar companions. This shows that such companions can significantly
affect late stellar evolution and that sdB binaries are ideal objects to study
this influence. Thirty-eight new eclipsing sdB binary systems with cool
low-mass companions and periods from 0.05 to 0.5 d were discovered based on
their light curves by the OGLE project. In the recently published catalog of
eclipsing binaries in the Galactic bulge, we discovered 75 more systems. We
want to use this unique and homogeneously selected sample to derive the mass
distribution of the companions, constrain the fraction of sub-stellar
companions and determine the minimum mass needed to strip off the red-giant
envelope. We are especially interested in testing models that predict hot
Jupiter planets as possible companions. Therefore, we started the EREBOS
(Eclipsing Reflection Effect Binaries from the OGLE Survey) project, which aims
at analyzing those new HW Vir systems based on a spectroscopic and photometric
follow up. For this we were granted an ESO Large Program for ESO-VLT/FORS2.
Here we give an update on the current status of the project and present some
preliminary results.
