Daily Archives: 19-April-2016

Nonlinear Piecewise Function for Stellar Luminosity vs Mass

A reader mentioned to me that the Wikipedia has an good article on stellar luminosity versus stellar mass– the article is a good one. I thought I would compare the empirical relationship shown in the Wikipedia with a couple of different data sets that I found on the web. I was motivated to perform this analysis because: (1) I have been doing some reading on exoplanets, and luminosity is important when it comes to exoplanet temperature; and (2) I am presenting a seminar on Mathcad to our engineering staff, and this application provides me a nice demonstration on how to compute nonlinear piecewise functions. Continue reading

Posted in Astronomy, General Mathematics | 1 Comment