On Estimating the Masses of the Components of Visual Binary Systems

Determining the mass of a star is an important and complex process, possible only for the components of 2–3 hundred binary systems of certain observational classes. However, for thousands and tens of thousands of binaries of other observational classes, a simple and fast estimation of component masses is possible. In this paper, a method for estimating the mass ratio of the components from the difference in their luminosity and the total mass of the system has been proposed. The approbation of the technique on test sets of binaries with known component masses has showed a good (at the level of 7%) agreement of the results. The technique can be applied to visual binary systems of the main sequence with known parallaxes and orbital elements. The approximating polynomials have been presented in the paper as Fortran 90, C++, Pascal, and Python codes. The work is partially based on a talk presented at the Modern Stellar Astronomy 2024 conference.