The new generation of ground-based, large-aperture solar telescopes promises to significantly increase our capabilities to understand the many basic phenomena taking place in the Sun at all atmospheric layers and how they relate to each other. A (non-exhaustive) summary of the main scientific arguments to pursue these impressive technological goals

The blazar PG 1553+113 is a well known TeV γ-ray emitter. In this paper we determine its spectral energy distribution through simultaneous multi-frequency data to study its emission processes. An extensive campaign was carried out between March and April 2008, where optical, X-ray, high-energy (HE) γ-ray, and very-high-energy (VHE) γ-ray data were

Context. The star HD 49385 is the first G-type solar-like pulsator observed in the seismology field of the space telescope CoRoT. The satellite collected 137 days of high-precision photometric data on this star, confirming that it presents solar-like oscillations. HD 49385 was also observed in spectroscopy with the NARVAL spectrograph in January

The picture of building the Milky Way halo from the merger of protogalactic fragments is considered the local manifestation of the hierarchical galaxy formation process. In this scenario, some studies have suggested that the outer young Galactic halo globular cluster population might be connected to the tidal disruption of dwarf spheroidals

CoRoT-9b is the first temperate transiting exoplanet. With a semi-major axis of 0.41 AU on a quasi-circular orbit, this is the first transiting planet far enough from its parent star to have an extended Hill sphere (3.5 million kilometers in radius), as needed to form and sustain rings and satellites. CoRoT-9b is thus the most promising planet

Because of the high quality of its sky, the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM), located on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, is home to many astronomical facilities. In the context of the Extremely Large Telescope Design Study, two intensive lidar campaigns were performed at the ORM near the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope between 2007