Despite thousands of extrasolar planets discovered to date, the dominant mechanisms forming planets and the timescales of planetary migration and atmospheric evaporation remain to be probed observationally. To shed light on these mechanisms, we performed a combined photometric and spectroscopic analysis of several young transiting systems at

The ESA PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission aims at the detection and characterisation (radii, mass, density, age) of terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone around Sun-like stars. To achieve these goals, an optimised complementary Ground-based Observations Programme (GOP) is set up with the purpose to

The evolution of galaxies appears linked to the growth of supermassive black holes (SMBH), as evidenced by empirical scale relations between hosts' large-scale properties and the mass of their central black holes. This co-evolutionary scenario suggests that all galaxies experience nuclear activity — active phases during which the black hole