Slow earthquakes and afterslips prove that the Earth does not have just two response time scales, i.e. that of tectonic loading and that of regular earthquakes. A swarm of slow earthquakes, with time constants of the order of hundreds of seconds, has been detected by a laser interferometer below the Gran Sasso massif (Italy). We analyse and model

Context. Light bridges are convective intrusions in sunspots that often show enhanced chromospheric activity. Aims: We seek to determine the nature of flux emergence in a light bridge and the processes related to its evolution in the solar atmosphere. Methods: We analyse a sequence of high-resolution spectropolarimetric observations of a sunspot

Context. Research on supernovae (SNe) over the past decade has confirmed that there is a distinct class of events which are much more luminous (by 2 mag) than canonical core-collapse SNe (CCSNe). These events with visual peak magnitudes ≲-21 are called superluminous SNe (SLSNe). The mechanism that powers the light curves of SLSNe is still not well

A recent paper by King & Ritter proposed that the light curves of soft X-ray transients (SXTs) are dominated by the effect of irradiation of the accretion disc by the central X-rays. This prevents the onset of the cooling wave which would otherwise return the disc to the quiescent state, and so prolongs the outbursts beyond those in dwarf nova

We explore the effect of the magnetic field when using realistic three-dimensional convection experiments to determine solar element abundances. By carrying out magnetoconvection simulations with a radiation-hydro code (the Copenhagen stagger code) and through a posteriori spectral synthesis of three Fe I lines, we obtain evidence that moderate

Aims: We investigate the impact on Fe abundance determination of including magnetic flux in series of 3D radiation-magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations of solar convection, which we used to synthesize spectral intensity profiles corresponding to disc centre. Methods: A differential approach is used to quantify the changes in theoretical