Superdense massive galaxies (re ~ 1 kpc; M ~ 1011 M sun) were common in the early universe (z gsim 1.5). Within some hierarchical merging scenarios, a non-negligible fraction (1%-10%) of these galaxies is expected to survive since that epoch, retaining their compactness and presenting old stellar populations in the present universe. Using the NYU

We present a catalogue with accurate stellar parameters for the 451 stars that compose the HARPS Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) ``high precision'' sample. We use our results, together with the others found in the literature, to study the metallicity-planet correlation, namely for very low mass planets. The results presented here suggests that

With more than 80 transits observed in the CoRoT lightcurve with a cadence of 32 s, CoRoT-Exo-2b provides an excellent case to search for the secondary eclipse of the planet, with an expected signal of less than 10-4 in relative flux. The activity of the star causes a modulation on the flux that makes the detection of this signal challenging. We

We report on our on-going proper motion survey of very low-mass (>=5 MJup), ultracool (Teff>=350 K) companions of nearby, field T-type brown dwarfs in the Solar neighborhood. Our project is intended to provide seeing-limited images of the targets to find companion candidates at wide separations (>=15 AU) and within an area of 3'×3' around the

We present a detailed analysis of 101 white dwarf main-sequence binaries (WDMS) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) for which multiple SDSS spectra are available. (2 data files).

In this paper, we present a detailed study of the peculiar early-type galaxy NGC 1947. The main goal of this work is to constrain the dynamical status and the formation history of NGC 1947 by comparing the observed properties with the predictions derived from different galaxy formation scenarios. To this aim, we derived the photometric and