Astron. Astrophys. 357, 1115-1122 (2000)

4. General solution of the basic equations with , 

Eliminating mass between Eqs. (1) and (2) we arrive at

where

          is the ablation term and

  is the deceleration term.

Here means natural logarithm. If the ablation term is identically (for all time instants) equal to the deceleration term, then K = constant.

Eq. (10) and represent a complete solution. Similar numerical procedure as for the case with constant and K can be applied to fit the computed distances along the trajectory to the observed distances, except that the partial derivatives cannot be written in a close form and have to be computed by numerical procedures only.

Eq. (10) contains two unknown functions , . Assuming one of them, the other is resulting from (10). If we could determine as well as from the observed distances, we would be able to compute and then from Eq. (10) also . This will be described in details in the next section.

Once we have solved Eq. (10), mass and ablation are given as

and

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 2000

Online publication: June 5, 2000
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