Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2017
From the existing literature data have been collected on the stellar rate of mass loss for 189 stars with known or derived values of the effective temperature Teff and luminosity L. It appears that Ṁ depends only on Teff and L for the O- through M-type stars brighter that about 3 × 103 L⊙. This is shown in Figure 1, where we have plotted for each star the value of - log(-Ṁ) with Ṁ expressed in solar masses per year. An interpolation formula has been derived for the Ṁ(Teff, L) dependence. If we define X = log Teff-4, and Y = log(L/L⊙-5, then