Over the past decades a large diversity in planetary systems, accompanied by a large diversity of planetary natures, have been discovered. Nevertheless, despite probable surprises, our knowledge of the solar system planets will be our guidance in the interpretation of the physical properties of extrasolar planet atmospheres. Thus, the solar system

Radial velocity measurements were taken of a group of Ap stars using an improved FP-ISOS. Observations were made using the 1.5m TCS on Tenerife in May 1987 and December 1987. The already known rapidly oscillating Ap stars 33 Lib and HR1217 were observed in order to search for radial velocity variations corresponding to the photometric periods found

Several techniques are achieving nowadays the precision levels required to detect few-Earth-mass planets, but still a fruitful path needs to be explored in order to detect a planet like the Earth orbiting inside the habitable zone of a star. We summarize the different approaches followed to reach this goal, and highlight their achievements.

We conduct a comprehensive numerical study of the orbital dependence of harassment on early-type dwarfs consisting of 168 different orbits within a realistic, Virgo-like cluster, varying in eccentricity and pericentre distance. We find harassment is only effective at stripping stars or truncating their stellar discs for orbits that enter deep into

Swift, a dedicated gamma-ray burst (GRB) satellite with ultrarapid slewing capability, and a suite of ground-based (ESO) telescopes have recently achieved a major breakthrough: detecting the first afterglows of short-duration GRBs. The faintness of these afterglows and the diversity of old and young host galaxies lend support to the emerging

We present the Data Release 9 Quasar (DR9Q) catalog from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. The catalog includes all BOSS objects that were targeted as quasar candidates during the survey, are spectrocopically confirmed as quasars via visual inspection, have luminosities Mi[z = 2] -20.5 (in a