One of the next most important goals of astronomy is the characterization of exo-solar planets and the search for extra terrestrial life. Traditional spectroscopic measurements cannot be easily applied to the study of the atmospheres of the exo-solar planets, because the light reflected by the planet is overwhelmed by the radiation of the hosting

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Context. The fraction of binary stars is an important ingredient to interpret globular cluster dynamical evolution and their stellar population. Aims: We investigate the properties of main-sequence binaries measured in a uniform photometric sample of 59 Galactic globular clusters that were observed by HST WFC/ACS as a part of the Globular Cluster

The standard model of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGNs) predicts that Type 2 AGNs and Type 1 AGNs only differ in the orientation of a dust torus, which does or does not allow one to observe the central region. If the model is correct, the time-scales and the amplitudes of observed temporal variations should be different between obscured and unobscured

A virtual substrate for high quality InAs epitaxial layer has been attained via metalorganic vapor-phase epitaxy growth of Sb-assisted InxGa1-xAs metamorphic buffers, following a convex compositional continuous gradient of the In content from x = 53% to 100%. The use of trimethylantimony (or its decomposition products) as a surfactant has been

We acquired spectra at Las Campanas Observatory with the 6.5-m telescope and the Magellan Inamori Kyocera (MIKE) spectrograph, covering a wavelength range from 3350Å to 9400Å on September 2009 and June 2010. The spectra were exposed deep enough to detect, with signal-to-noise ratio higher than three, the weak optical recombination lines (ORLs) of