Galaxy discs are made of two components, the thin and the thick disc. Thick discs contain up to 50% of the baryonic mass of a galaxy. Because their stars are among the oldest in the Universe, thick discs are relics of the infancy of galaxies. Thus, understanding the origin of thick discs is key to unveil how galaxies themselves form, which in turn

High-resolution, high-stability spectroscopy is crucial for the precise determination of radial velocities and the detailed chemical analysis of stars in different contexts of the Galaxy. The ESPRESSO and HORuS spectrographs, in operation on the VLT and GTC telescopes since mid-2018, are already contributing significantly to our knowledge of

In a Universe dominated by Cold Dark Matter (CDM), the growth of galaxies is expected to happen hierarchically: mergers of small systems eventually create a giant galaxy. This theory has been very successful at describing the evolution of Mpc-size structures (such as filaments and galaxy clusters) and it seems to work well for massive ellipticals

PARSEC is a multiwavelength investigation of the centre of the nearest galaxies at parsecs scale. It studies the brightest mv <19 mag, and nearest up to ~ 20 Mpc galaxies which allow a sampling of a few parsecs in the nuclear region. All PARSEC galaxies host an AGN of different activity level, spanning 7 order of magnitude in Eddington luminosity

COSJWST is an ambitious multidisciplinary project to study complex organic species (e.g., fullerene and graphene species and their derivatives, among others) in the imminent James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) era. COSJWST will enable us to take a fundamental step forward in improving our understanding of the complexity of organic matter in space