Accurate astronomical distance determination is crucial for all fields in astrophysics, from Galactic to cosmological scales. Despite, or perhaps because of, significant efforts to determine accurate distances, using a wide range of methods, tracers, and techniques, an internally consistent astronomical distance framework has not yet been

We obtained multi-epoch Very Large Telescope optical spectroscopic data in 2011 and 2012 on the ultraluminous X-ray source NGC 5408 X-1. We confirm that the He II λ4686 line has a broad component with an average full width at half-maximum of v = 780 ± 64 km s-1 with a variation of ˜13 per cent during observations spanning over four years, and is

We employ the first two years of data from the near-infrared, high-resolution SDSS-III/APOGEE spectroscopic survey to investigate the distribution of metallicity and α-element abundances of stars over a large part of the Milky Way disk. Using a sample of ≈10, 000 kinematically unbiased red-clump stars with ~5% distance accuracy as tracers, the [α

In this short letter we present our new work on the coronal emission in a sample of AGN. We used the adaptive optics system NACO on the VLT to obtain high angular resolution images (˜0.15') of the coronal emission in the vicinity of the central engine.

Our current knowledge of star formation and accretion luminosity at high redshift (z > 3-4), as well as the possible connections between them, relies mostly on observations in the rest-frame ultraviolet, which are strongly affected by dust obscuration. Due to the lack of sensitivity of past and current infrared instrumentation, so far it has not

We report results obtained from a systematic analysis of X-ray lags in a sample of black hole X-ray binaries, with the aim of assessing the presence of reverberation lags and studying their evolution during outburst. We used XMM-Newton and simultaneous Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) observations to obtain broadband energy coverage of both the