EMIR is a wide-field, near-IR spectrograph currently under development for the Nasmyth focus of the Spanish 10.4m GTC at Canary Islands. EMIR will provide imaging and multi-slit spectroscopy in the ˜1-2.5 micron domain at a resolution of R˜5000-4000. This paper reviews the status of the project, including instrumental developments and main science

We report on our ongoing efforts to probe for extrasolar giant planets in the Sigma Orionis open cluster. With an age of about 3 Myr, a distance of about 440 pc and very low reddening, this cluster provides a privileged hunting ground for brown dwarfs and superplanets. Several L dwarfs and one T dwarf have been identified in the cluster. Assuming

We give a progress report on the activities within the CIFIST Team related to the search for extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's (SDSS) spectroscopic catalogue. So far, the search has provided 25 candidates with metallicities around or smaller than -3. For 15 candidates, high-resolution spectroscopy with UVES at the

We present the results of a dedicated search for extremely metal-poor stars in the Fornax, Sculptor, and Sextans dSphs. Five stars were selected from two earlier VLT/Giraffe and HET/HRS surveys and subsequently followed up at high spectroscopic resolution with VLT/UVES. All of them turned out to have [Fe/H] ⪉ -3 and three stars are below [Fe/H] ~

In this paper we present the photometric properties of a sample of extremely red galaxies (EROs, R-Ks≥5.6), found in the field of the lensing cluster Abell 1835. Using optical, near- and mid-infrared colours, we compare our ERO sample with other galaxy populations with extreme colours, like distant red galaxies (DRGs, J-Ks≥2.3) and infrared

We present preliminary results on the analysis of very deep echelle UVES (8m VLT) spectra of the Galactic H II region S311 (NGC 2467) located outside the Solar circle. The data cover from 3100 to 10450 Å with a resolution R ~ 8800. We have detected and measured more than 300 emission lines, some of them are faint recombination lines of heavy