Understanding the properties, formation, and evolutionary path of high- mass star systems is a fundamental research topic in stellar astrophysics. Under certain conditions, massive binaries form gravitationally bound compact objects capable of merging in less than the age of the Universe, producing gravitational waves detectable by observatories

In this roadmap article, we consider the main challenges and recent breakthroughs in understanding the role of carbon molecular nanostructures in space and propose future avenues of research. The focus lies on small carbon-containing molecules up to fullerenes, extending to even larger, more complex organic species. The roadmap contains forty

Context. In solar-like oscillators, acoustic waves are excited by turbulent motion in the convective envelope and propagate inward, generating a variety of standing pressure modes (p modes). When combining the power of several solar acoustic modes, some studies have reported an excess that is not compatible with pure stochastic excitation. This

Red supergiant (RSG) stars represent the final evolutionary phase of the majority of massive stars and hold a unique role in testing the physics of stellar models. Eighty-eight RSGs in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) were recently found to have an ultraviolet (UV) excess, which was attributed to a B-type companion. We present follow-up Hubble

The steady-state gamma-ray emission from the Sun is thought to consist of two emission components due to interactions with Galactic cosmic rays: (1) a hadronic disk component, and (2) a leptonic extended component peaking at the solar edge and extending into the heliosphere. The flux of these components is expected to vary with the 11 yr solar

We present new K-band spectroscopy for the giant elliptical galaxy M87 in the Virgo cluster, taken with the Large Binocular Telescope Utility Camera in the Infrared (LUCI) spectrograph at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). The new data are used to study line strengths of K-band absorption features from different chemical species, namely Fe, Mg