Several techniques are achieving nowadays the precision levels required to detect few-Earth-mass planets, but still a fruitful path needs to be explored in order to detect a planet like the Earth orbiting inside the habitable zone of a star. We summarize the different approaches followed to reach this goal, and highlight their achievements.

We present a catalog of stellar properties for a large sample of 6676 evolved stars with Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment spectroscopic parameters and Kepler asteroseismic data analyzed using five independent techniques. Our data include evolutionary state, surface gravity, mean density, mass, radius, age, and the

We conduct a comprehensive numerical study of the orbital dependence of harassment on early-type dwarfs consisting of 168 different orbits within a realistic, Virgo-like cluster, varying in eccentricity and pericentre distance. We find harassment is only effective at stripping stars or truncating their stellar discs for orbits that enter deep into

Swift, a dedicated gamma-ray burst (GRB) satellite with ultrarapid slewing capability, and a suite of ground-based (ESO) telescopes have recently achieved a major breakthrough: detecting the first afterglows of short-duration GRBs. The faintness of these afterglows and the diversity of old and young host galaxies lend support to the emerging

We present the Data Release 9 Quasar (DR9Q) catalog from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. The catalog includes all BOSS objects that were targeted as quasar candidates during the survey, are spectrocopically confirmed as quasars via visual inspection, have luminosities Mi[z = 2] -20.5 (in a

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