Galactic 26Al is believed to be predominantly injected into the ISM from winds and supernovae of massive stars. These stars are typically born in groups and associations, which evolve over tens of Myrs, and shape the interstellar medium in their surroundings. 26Al contained in stellar outflows produces a γ-ray line at 1.809 MeV, which is

We have carried out high angular resolution near-infrared imaging and low-resolution (R˜1000) spectroscopy of the nearest known brown dwarf, varepsilon Indi B, using the ESO VLT NAOS/CONICA adaptive optics system. We find it to be a close binary (as also noted by Volk et al. 2003), with an angular separation of 0.732 arcsec, corresponding to 2.65

An XMM-Newton target of opportunity observation of the field around the transient pulsar XTE J0055-727 (ATEL #214) in the Small Magellanic Cloud was performed on 2003-12-18 between 14:32 UT and 19:48 UT. Two bright X-ray sources were detected by the EPIC instruments. XMMU J005455.4-724512 is consistent in position with CXOU J005455.6-724510 = RX

The main aim of this paper is to report two new detections of tidal debris in the northern stream of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy located at 45° and 55° from the center of the galaxy. Our observational approach is based on deep color-magnitude diagrams that provide accurate distances, surface brightness, and the properties of stellar population of

The variation of the mass-to-light M/L ratios of early-type galaxies as a function of their luminosities L is investigated. It is shown that the tilt β=0.27 (in the B band) of the fundamental plane relation M/L~Lβ can be understood as a combination of two effects: about one-quarter (i.e., Δβ=0.07) is a result of systematic variations of the stellar

In this paper we discuss the reason why the parameters of the Sérsic model best-fitting the major axis light profile of elliptical galaxies can differ significantly from those derived for the minor axis profile. We show that this discrepancy is a natural consequence of the fact that the isophote eccentricity varies with the radius of the isophote