Our adaptive optics observations of nearby AGN at spatial resolutions as small as 0.″085 show strong evidence for recent, but no longer active, nuclear star formation. We begin by describing observations that highlight two contrasting methods by which gas can flow into the central tens of parsecs. Gas accumulation in this region will inevitably

The impact that unrecognized differences in the chemical patterns of Galactic globular clusters (GGCs) have on their relative age determinations is studied. The two most widely used relative age-dating methods, horizontal and vertical, together with the more recent relative MS-fitting method, were carefully analyzed on a purely theoretical basis

The Herschel ATLAS is the largest open-time key project that will be carried out on the Herschel Space Observatory. It will survey 570 deg of the extragalactic sky, 4 times larger than all the other Herschel extragalactic surveys combined, in five far-infrared and submillimeter bands. We describe the survey, the complementary multiwavelength data

Work done to date on the SMBH mass function has brought to light some interesting puzzles, the best known of which is cosmic downsizing. The solution to this problem is based upon the methodology by which we determine SMBH masses, which comes mainly from studies of active galaxies. The most massive SMBHs cease to be active at earlier epochs than

Following the recent re-brightening (ATel #2608) and RXTE-PCA detection of X-ray bursts from the peculiar X-ray binary Cir X-1 between May 15 and 25 (ATel #2643), we obtained a series of Swift-XRT observations of the field (see also ATel #2650). Swift-XRT detected an X-ray burst on 2010-05-28 at 12:08:19 UTC, which lasted about 60 seconds and had a

The angular distributions of fission fragments for the 32S+184W reaction near Coulomb barrier energies were measured. The experimental fission excitation function is obtained. The measured fission cross sections are decomposed into fusion-fission, quasifission and fast fission contributions by the dinuclear system model. The hindrance to complete