In August 2006 a new planetary transit was discovered from data from the TrES network. The discovery was confirmed using radial velocity curves obtained with the Keck and characterised with light curves in different filters obtained using two telescopes at the Observatorio del Teide: "IAC80" and "TELAST" (the first result of scientific interest obtained from the latter). The planet discovered, TrES-2, is more massive and somewhat larger than its quasi-homonym TrES-1 (the first exoplanet discovered using the transit method), and follows the expected patterns for this type of object. Its main importance is that it is the first object discovered in the area of observation of the future Kepler satellite, which will be able to track it in a degree of detail never before achieved.
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Accretion disks around compact objects are expected to enter an unstable phase at high luminosity. One instability may occur when the radiation pressure generated by accretion modifies the disk viscosity, resulting in the cyclic depletion and refilling of the inner disk on short timescales. Such a scenario, however, has only been quantitatively verified for a single stellar-mass black hole. Although there are hints of these cycles in a few isolated cases, their apparent absence in the variable emission of most bright accreting neutron stars and black holes has been a continuing puzzle. Here
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H II regions are ionized nebulae associated with the formation of massive stars. They exhibit a wealth of emission lines in their spectra that form the basis for estimation of chemical composition. The amount of heavy chemical elements is essential to the understanding of important phenomena such as nucleosynthesis, star formation and chemical evolution of galaxies. For over 80 years, however, a discrepancy exists of a factor of around two between heavy-element abundances (the so-called metallicity) derived from the two main kinds of emission lines that can be measured in nebular spectra
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Stellar ages are key to several fields of astrophysics such as exoplanet research, galactic-archeology, and of course stellar physics. Obtaining the ages of stars is however not straightforward and requires stellar modeling. The most widely used technique only requires stellar colors or temperature and surface gravity, but the uncertainties are quite large. This technique is most efficient for stars belonging to clusters, as they were born from the same molecular cloud and share the same ages. In the last decades, based on the study of stellar acoustic waves, asteroseismology became the most
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