Studying Broad Absorption Line Quasars (BAL QSOs) is interesting because they probe the physics of the AGN environment, and because AGN outflows are important ingredients in many recent astrophysical puzzles. In the last decade, a substantial population of radio BAL QSOs was discovered and we have started a characterisation of the radio-loud BAL

TRUFAS is a wavelet-based algorithm developed for the rapid detection of planetary transits in the frame of the COROT space mission. We present the application of this algorithm to the first two observing fields of CoRoT data. In these, CoRoT has observed a total of about 20000 stars. The first CoRoT observing run, IRa01, covers 2 months, February

Aims: We introduce our imaging survey of possible young massive globular clusters in M31 performed with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). We obtained shallow (to B˜ 25) photometry of individual stars in 20 candidate clusters. We present here details of the data reduction pipeline that is being

We present a matched filter algorithm to detect transits of planets that orbit both components of close eclipsing binaries in CoRoT targets. The formation of binary systems surrounded by disks is one of the most common outcomes of stellar formation; their detection would therefore constitute an important discovery. In an eclipsing binary system

We show that elementary aligned electromagnetic excitations of black holes, as coming from exact Kerr-Schild solutions, represent light-like beams pulses which have a very strong back reaction on the metric and change the topology of the horizon. Based on York's proposal, that elementary deformations of the BH horizon are related with elementary

Angular momentum exchange between a bar and a massive halo is thought to be responsible for producing strong bars in disk galaxies (Athanassoula, 2003), while gas transport to the center is believed to weaken or even dissolve bars (Bournaud and Combes 2002). We are carrying out a systematic survey of early-type disk galaxies with the main emphasis