Return to Home Page
The RXTE X-ray lightcurve of Eta Car through June 7 is available at http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/users/corcoran/eta_car/etacar_rxte_lightcurve/ the observed drop is about 6 cts/s/day - the largest observed drop ever recorded. The star has not been this faint in X-rays since about Jan 3 2003 - more importantly this rate is much lower than the most recent minima observed in the lightcurve. This is a strong sign that the ingress to X-ray minima is occurring. A linear fit to the data since June 4 (the last observed X-ray peak) suggests that the X-ray minimum will occur near June 11, if the rate declines linearly - my guess is that this won't hold true and the real minimum will occur near late June. I'm preparing an IAU Circular about this. Also, the XMM project has kindly scheduled two TOO observations: - the first for 41200 sec on 2003-06-08@12:42:14 (today!) - the second for 32700 sec on 2003-06-13@23:33:50 cheers Mike -- *********************************************************** Dr. Michael F. Corcoran Universities Space Research Association Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD 20771 301-286-5576 (office) 301-286-1684 (fax) corcoran@barnegat.gsfc.nasa.gov http://lheawww.gsfc.nasa.gov/users/corcoran/bio.html ***********************************************************
Return to the Powerful Daisaku
vsnet-adm@kusastro.kyoto-u.ac.jp
