The most prominent magnetic structures on the surface of the Sun are bipolar active regions. These magnetic complexes are comprised of a hierarchy of magnetic structures of different sizes, the largest of which are sunspots. Observations indicate that the appearance of active regions on the solar surface result from the emergence of bundles of

Aims:We describe a new form of small-scale magnetic flux emergence in the quiet Sun. This process seems to take vertical magnetic fields from subsurface layers to the photosphere, where they appear above granular convection cells. Methods: High-cadence time series of spectropolarimetric measurements obtained by Hinode in a quiet region near disk

Context: There is considerable controversy surrounding the nature of M1-78, a compact nebula located beyond the Perseus arm. It was first classified as a planetary nebula and is nowadays generally considered to be a compact H II region. Aims: To investigate the nature of M1-78 further, we present a detailed spectroscopic study of M1-78 in the

We present results of integral field optical spectroscopy of five luminous blue compact dwarf galaxies. The data were obtained using the fiber system INTEGRAL attached to the William Herschel Telescope. The galaxies Mrk 370, Mrk 35, Mrk 297, Mrk 314, and III Zw 102 were observed. The central 33.6''×29.4'' regions of the galaxies were mapped with a

The paper describes an application of the tree classification method Random Forest (RF), as used in the analysis of data from the ground-based gamma telescope MAGIC. In such telescopes, cosmic gamma-rays are observed and have to be discriminated against a dominating background of hadronic cosmic-ray particles. We describe the application of RF for

With the recent discoveries of hundreds of extrasolar planets, the search for planets like Earth and life in the universe is quickly gaining momentum. In the future, large space observatories could directly detect the light scattered from rocky planets, but they would not be able to spatially resolve a planet's surface. Using reflectance models and