In recent years, a technology developed between the 1950s and 1970s by the pioneering experiments of Hanbury Brown and Twiss has (re)emerged: the Stellar Intensity Interferometry (SII). Unlike amplitude interferometry, SII exploits a second-order effect that can be measured by correlating the light intensities at different detectors without the

The ESA PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission aims at the detection and characterisation (radii, mass, density, age) of terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone around Sun-like stars. To achieve these goals, an optimised complementary Ground-based Observations Programme (GOP) is set up with the purpose to

The High Angular Resolution Monolithic Optical and Near-infrared Integral field spectrograph (HARMONI) is a first generation instrument designed for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). HARMONI offers operational versatility, enabling both seeing-limited (NOAO) operation and compensation for atmospheric optical turbulence using two systems: Single

Context. Open clusters provide valuable information on stellar nucleosynthesis and the chemical evolution of the Galactic disk, as their age and distances can be measured more precisely with photometry than in the case of field stars. Aims: Our aim is to study the chemical distribution of the Galactic disk using open clusters by analyzing the

Ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs) have been one of the latest hypes in the extragalactic community. Although discovered a few decades ago, only recently we have had the opportunity to start grasping their nature thanks to deep photometric observations and, more challengingly, spectroscopic ones. From different properties ranging from their dark matter

Accretion onto compact objects, such as black holes and neutron stars, is one of the most powerful processes in the Universe, involving large exchanges of mass and energy. Among the astrophysical systems where this phenomenon is observed, X-ray binaries are particularly relevant due to their relatively short timescales of evolution, which are