Spitzer Space Telescope observations of several quiescent black hole low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) have shown mid-infrared excesses above the emission of a companion star. The excess has been proposed to originate from either a relativistic jet or circumbinary disk. If the mid-IR originates in a jet, then it probes the region closest to the black

The age of a star cannot be measured but only inferred from observational quantities related to age. A wellknown stellar age greatly impacts our understanding of evolution on much larger scales, such as exoplanetary systems or the history of the Milky Way. For stars in the red-giant phase, comparison of observations with evolutionary models

Both Galactic dust emission and Cosmic infrared background anisotropies (CIB) act as a dominant foreground contaminant for the measurements of the CMB anisotropies (intensity and polarization) at the frequency range above 217 GHz. The Galactic dust and CIB share a similar form of spectral energy distribution, which makes it harder to disentangle