Historically, globular clusters (GCs) have been used as laboratories for studying stellar evolution, because it was thought that all the stars in a globular cluster formed at the same time and thus have the same age. However since a couple of decades ago it has been known that almost all the globular clusters contain several stellar populations. In the first generation the chemical abundances, for example those of elements such as Al and Mg, show the composition of the original interstellar (or intra-cluster) medium. In the short time (astronomically) of only 500 million years the medium is

Ultra diffuse galaxies (UDGs) have the sizes of giants but the luminosities of dwarfs. A key to understanding their origins comes from their total masses, but their low surface brightnesses (mu > 25.0) generally prohibit dynamical studies. Here we report the first such measurements for a UDG (VCC 1287 in the Virgo cluster), based on its globular cluster system dynamics and size. From 7 GCs we measure a mean systemic velocity Vsys = 1071(-15+14) km/s, thereby confirming a Virgo-cluster association. We measure a velocity dispersion of 33(-10+16) km/s within 8.1 kpc, corresponding to an

For more than 70 years we have known that the weak recombination lines of the ions of elements, such as oxygen and carbon, give us values for their abundances that are much larger than those obtained using collisional lines, even though the collisional lines are 1,000 to 100,000 times brighter than the recombination lines. This discrepancy has cast constant doubt about one of the methods that has been mostly used to measure chemical abundances in the Universe. During the past few years the planetary nebulae group at the IAC have discovered that the planetary nebulae with the largest

The polarization of the Mg II k line at 279.5 nm encodes valuable information on the magnetic field of the upper solar chromosphere, where this strong resonance line originates. We have developed a novel radiative transfer code which allows us to account for scattering polarization and the Hanle and Zeeman effects, as well as partial frequency redistribution (PRD) phenomena (i.e., correlation effects between the incoming and outgoing photons in the scattering events). This non-LTE code, which treats the atomic system and the polarized radiation field quantum-mechanically, has been applied to

Superclusters are the largest over-dense, relatively isolated systems in the cosmic web. They provide us invaluable information about the large-scale structure formation at different cosmic epochs, as well as they are excellent places for understanding galaxy evolution in detail. Thanks to the new SDSS-III data, we can extend our knowledge of superclusters to the redshift range above z=0.4. We used data from the twelfth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Using a sample of more than 500,000 galaxies up to z~0.8, we reconstructed the large-scale luminosity-density field and

V404 Cygni is a black hole within a binary system where a black hole of around 10 times the mass of the Sun is swallowing material from a very nearby star. During this process material falls onto the black hole and forms an accretion disc, whose hotter, innermost zones emit in X-rays. On June 2015 V404 Cygni went into outburst after a quiescence of over 25 years. During this period its brightness increased on million fold in a few days, becoming the brightest X-ray source in the sky. Optical observations carried out with the GTC 10.4m discovered the presence of a wind of cold material, which