Dr. Michael Francis Corcoran

Job Description: Astrophysicist

Office: Room 221, Building 2, Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, 20771

Phone: (301) 286-5576

Fax: (301) 286-1684

e-mail: corcoran@barnegat.gsfc.nasa.gov

Mike Corcoran received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, where, as a graduate student in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, he learned the (often frustrating) art of visible-band photometry and polarimetry. Mike's thesis was an attempt to explore the importance of non-sphericity of winds from hot, massive stars by looking for a residual polarimetric signal in the photospheric radiation scattered by the wind material. As a result of this work, Mike became convinced of three things: that the assumption of spherical symmetry applied to winds from hot stars is, in general, unphysical; that disturbances in stellar winds can have observable effects throughout the electromagnetic spectrum; and that an unheated telescope dome gets pretty cold in winter.

Moving indoors, in 1988 Mike found a job at NASA/GSFC as a post-doc with Advanced Computer Concepts (ACC) studying stellar wind behavior via analysis of UV spectral lines. After finishing his tenure at ACC in 1989, Mike inverse-Compton scattered his way to an NRC post-doc at the X-ray group at GSFC.

In 1991 Mike went to work for Universities Space Research Association and joined the ROSAT Guest Observer Facility at GSFC as lead archive scientist. In 1993 Mike joined the HEASARC, and now serves as the manager of the HEASARC Calibration Database and HEASARC archive scientist for the GLAST mission, in addition to his continuing duties as ROSAT archive scientist.

Points of interest:

• Interpolated Eta Car lightcurve movie by Laura Woodworth
• Jack's Page
• Mike's curriculum vitae (including hyperlinked list of references)
• Analysis Notes
  • Using the Penn State CTI corrector on ACIS data
• Talks
  • "X-ray Emission as a Probe of the Wind-Driven Shock in WR 140"(pdf), LHEA Tuesday Seminar, February 6, 2001
  • "Comparing the X-ray properties of Eta Car and WR 140", AAS 199 (pdf)
  • "X-ray Emission from Massive Colliding Wind Binaries", IAU Symposium 212, June 24-28 2002 (invited talk) (pdf)
  • "Eta Carinae: X-ray Emission and New Developments", Eta Car: Reading the Legend, Mt. Rainier, Washington, July 10-14 2002 (invited talk) (pdf)
  • "Eta Car: High Energy Observations during the Event in 2003.5", Eta Car: Reading the Legend, Mt. Rainier, Washington, July 10-14 2002 (invited talk)
  • HEAD 2003 Eta Car invited talk ( ppt, pdf)
  • "Multi-wavelength Observations of Colliding Stellar Winds", X-Ray and Radio Connections, Santa Fe, NM, 2-6 Feb 2004.
• NGBROWSE user's guide (ps, under construction)
• Summary of the ASCA pointings at Eta Car (preprint in pdf or gzipped ps versions)
• The X-ray Lightcurve of Eta Car: Refinement of the Orbit and Evidence for Phase Dependent Mass Loss (preprint in either pdf or ps versions)
• Postscript version of Mike's contribution to the Eta Car at the Millenium Proceedings (gzipped, 149 kbyte)
• The X-ray "MEGA" campaign on Hot stars
• ROSAT RESULTS ARCHIVE
• WR stars in the ROSAT PSPC archive (gzipped postscript; 1.0 Mbytes; last updated: 22 Dec 95)
• Early-Type binary star X-ray lightcurves from the ROSAT public data archive (postscript; 250 Kbytes; last updated: 17 Jan 96)
• Eight Catalogue of the Orbital Elements of Spectroscopic Binary Systems (1989, Batten, Fletcher & MacCarthy, PDA0, 17, 1) copied from GSU astronomy department home page)
• ROSAT PSPC image of Gamma2 Vel field from 180017n00 (exposure = 5511 s). Box shows location and size of ASCA SIS0 chip 1. An Einstein HRI image is also available.
• The ASCA SIS0 image of Gamma2 Vel in the high state. Only chip 1 is shown. The field of view is about 11 arcmin x 11 arcmin. The ASCA GIS2 image of Gamma2 Vel in the high state. The field of view of the GIS is about 50 arcmin in diameter.
• Lightcurve of HD 50896 extracted from archival ROSAT PSPC observations (A. Willis PI) by MFC; see Willis, Schild, Howarth, and Stevens (1994, Ap&SS, 221, 321) for more details. Here's a PSPC image of the field centered on HD50896 from wp200781
• A 50-ksec HRI image of the Carina nebula centered on Eta Carinae. Here's an optical image of the same field at the same plate scale (5"/pixel) from the digitized sky survey.
• A PSPC contour map of the region near HD 5980 (from rp500250n00) taken in late 1993. The scale is 7.5 arcsec/pixel. The optical location of HD 5980 is at the center of the box.
• Optical image of NGC 3603 (from the DSS) with PSPC X-ray contours.
• Available X-ray Spectra of WR 140.
• Here's a comparison of the ao4 and PV spectrum for Yohko.
• Correlation coefficients for Mike Stark's XTE DATA CUBE (cube.data)

X-ray Observations of Eta Carinae