Traditionally the earth's reflectance has been assumed to be roughly constant, but large decadal variability, not reproduced by current climate models, has been reported lately from a variety of sources. We compare here the available datasets related to earth's reflectance, in order to assess the observational constraints on the models. We find a

Galactic black holes release an unknown fraction of their accreting matter and energy in the form of collimated outflows (or jets) that travel into the surrounding medium. Black Hole X-ray Binaries (BHXBs) are the essential laboratories for understanding the overall physics of the accretion process in these systems, and have provided us with a

We analyse Spectrographic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae (SAURON) kinematic maps of the inner kiloparsec of the early-type (Sa) barred spiral galaxy NGC 5448. The observed morphology and kinematics of the emission-line gas is patchy and perturbed, indicating clear departures from circular motion. The kinematics of the stars is more

Recent studies of the substellar population in the Taurus cloud have revealed a deficit of brown dwarfs compared to the Trapezium cluster population (citealt{Briceno-1998,Luhman-2000,Luhman-2003a,Luhman-2004}) However, these works have concentrated on the highest stellar density regions of the Taurus cloud. We have performed a large scale optical

This paper presents the results of a detailed X-ray spectral analysis of a sample of 123 X-ray sources detected with XMM-Newton in the Lockman Hole field. This is the deepest observation carried out with XMM-Newton with more that 600ks of good EPIC-pn data. We have spectra with good signal to noise (>500 source counts) for all objects down to 0.2

We present the main results derived from a chemical analysis carried out on a large sample of galactic O-rich AGB stars using high resolution optical spectroscopy (R~40,000-50,000) with the intention of studying their lithium abundances and/or possible s-process element enrichment. Our chemical analysis shows that some stars are lithium