Peter P. Eggleton developed a widely useful approximation for the effective radius of a Roche lobe in a binary star system. His 1983 calculation integrated the lobe's volume and represented the result with a smooth function of the stellar mass ratio.
Smoothness was a practical improvement: a previously used piecewise approximation had a discontinuous derivative, which could introduce artificial features into numerical calculations of binary evolution. The Eggleton Roche-lobe radius approximation avoids that join while closely fitting the computed volumes.[ref]

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