Letter to the Editor

Revisiting the mass-luminosity relation with an effective temperature modifier

¹ Key Laboratory of Optical Astronomy, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101 PR China
e-mail: wjf@zihexin.com
² School of Astronomy and Space Science, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, PR China
e-mail: zhzhong@nao.cas.cn

Received: 19 August 2018
Accepted: 27 September 2018

Abstract

The mass-luminosity relation (MLR) is commonly used to estimate the stellar mass. The classical MLR can hardly fit data of all the stellar mass range, thus researchers have generally adopted piecewise MLRs based on the classical MLR with different exponents for different mass ranges. However, varying turning points for the piecewise MLRs and for the exponent of each segment were used, and the estimated stellar masses are not always as good as those obtained by dynamical methods. We suggest an alternative way to improve the mass estimation accuracy: adding an effective temperature modifier to modify every segment MLR. We use a corresponding estimating equation for G- and K-type main-sequence stars, and verify this equation on two eclipsing binary catalogs. We compare the estimated results with those from a classical MLR and several piecewise MLRs. We find that the new estimates are significantly more accurate than those from the classical MLR and some piecewise MLRs, and they are not inferior to the stellar masses from other piecewise MLRs. This indicates that the temperature modifier can effectively help improve the estimation accuracy. In addition, we discuss the effect of adding the temperature modifier on the practicability of estimating stellar masses.