The TV broadcast discusses problems of the modernization of the Romanian astronomical infrastructure, the worst in Eastern Europe. It presents the TELEROM project which proposed to establish a new EU-funded robotic 1,3 m telescope, a project finally rejected by the Astronomical Institute of the Romanian Academy mainly due to the incompetence of the

The Kepler mission is providing photometric data of exquisite quality for the asteroseismic study of different classes of pulsating stars. These analyses place particular demands on the pre-processing of the data, over a range of time-scales from minutes to months. Here, we describe processing procedures developed by the Kepler Asteroseismic

Quasars (Quasi Stellar Objects, abbreviated as QSOs) are still nowadays, close to half a century after their discovery, objects which are not completel y understood. In this brief review a description of the pending problems, inconsistencies and caveats in the QSO's research is presented. The standard paradigm model based on the existence of very

Holmberg IX X-1 is an archetypal ultraluminous X-ray source (ULX). Here we study the properties of the optical counterpart and of its stellar environment using optical data from SUBARU/Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph, GEMINI/GMOS-N and Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/Advanced Camera for Surveys, as well as simultaneous Chandra X-ray data. The V ~

The neutron star transient and 11 Hz X-ray pulsar IGR J17480-2446, recently discovered in the globular cluster Terzan 5, showed unprecedented bursting activity during its 2010 October-November outburst. We analyzed all X-ray bursts detected with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and find strong evidence that they all have a thermonuclear origin

Many of the compact extragalactic radio sources that are used as fiducial points to define the celestial reference frame are known to have proper motions detectable with long-term geodetic/astrometric very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) measurements. These changes can be as high as several hundred microarcseconds per year for certain objects