Context: Over the past decade there have been a series of results supporting the hypothesis of the existence of a long thin bar in the Milky Way with a half-length of 4.5 kpc and a position angle of around 45°. This is apparently a very different structure from the triaxial bulge of the Galaxy, which is thicker and shorter and dominates the star

We present an overview of the ongoing Hubble Space Telescope large program GO-12911. The program is focused on the core of M 4, the nearest Galactic globular cluster, and the observations are designed to constrain the number of binaries with massive companions (black holes, neutron stars, or white dwarfs) by measuring the ``wobble'' of the luminous

The MAGIC telescope, presently at its commissioning phase, will become fully operative by the end of 2003. Placed at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) on the island of La Palma, MAGIC is the largest among new generation ground-based gamma ray telescopes, and will reach an energy threshold as low as 30 GeV. The range of the

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We present observations of the magnetic landscape of the polar region of the Sun that are unprecedented in terms of spatial resolution, field of view, and polarimetric precision. They were carried out with the Solar Optical Telescope aboard Hinode. Using a Milne-Eddington inversion, we find many vertically oriented magnetic flux tubes with field

We investigate the radial variation of the magnetic field structure across sunspots, pores and azimuth centers (ACs). We define ACs as magnetic structures of about the same size as pores (all structures studied here are larger than 3 Mm diameter), but without a clear (at least 5%) continuum decrease associated with them. We start from the full 3D