We investigate the column density distribution function of neutral hydrogen at redshift z = 3 using a cosmological simulation of galaxy formation from the OverWhelmingly Large Simulations project. The base simulation includes gravity, hydrodynamics, star formation, supernovae feedback, stellar winds, chemodynamics, and element-by-element cooling in

We present a detailed optical study of the ultracompact X-ray binary 4U 0614+091. We have used 63 hr of time-resolved optical photometry taken with three different telescopes (IAC80, NOT, and SPM) to search for optical modulations. The power spectra of each data set reveals sinusoidal modulations with different periods, which are not always present

We present the second part of the results of our spectroscopic study of orbital phase resolution of short-period active binaries. In this paper we present the observations of the binaries RT And, WY Cnc, and XY UMa, for which we obtained simultaneous low-resolution spectra in the Hα, Hβ, and Ca II infrared triplet (IRT; 8498 and 8542 Å) lines, and

We present a new direct spectroscopic calibration for a fast estimation of the stellar metallicity [Fe/H]. This calibration was computed using a large sample of 451 solar-type stars for which we have precise spectroscopic parameters derived from high quality spectra. The new [Fe/H] calibration is based on weak Fe I lines, which are expected to be

We used the CLUMPY torus models and a Bayesian approach to fit the infrared spectral energy distributions and ground-based high angular resolution mid-infrared spectroscopy of 13 nearby Seyfert galaxies. This allowed us to put tight constraints on torus model parameters such as the viewing angle i, the radial thickness of the torus Y, the angular

The Small Magellanic Cloud is a crucial galaxy to understand many aspects of the formation and evolution of galaxies. We propose to collect deep photometry in sixteen fields located at galactocentric distances from R_gc=2 to 4 degrees, in order to obtain color- magnitude diagrams reaching the oldest main sequence turnoff stars with high signal-to