Spectra of high-metallicity [12+log(O/H) >~ 8.2] HII regions, where oxygen auroral lines are measurable in both the O+ and O++ zones, have been extracted from the Data Release 6 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Our final sample consists of 181 SDSS spectra of HII regions in galaxies in the redshift range from ~0.025 to ~0.17. The t2,O-t3,O

Low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) that show thermonuclear bursts are ideal sources for constraining the equation of state of neutron star matter. The lack of independent distance measurements for most of these sources, however, prevent a systematic exploration of the masses and radii of the neutron stars, hence limiting the equation-of-state studies

We present preliminary asteroseismic results from Kepler on three G-type stars. The observations, made at one-minute cadence during the first 33.5 days of science operations, reveal high signal-to-noise solar-like oscillation spectra in all three stars: about 20 modes of oscillation may be clearly distinguished in each star. We discuss the

Aims: We report on the unusual distant activity of the dynamically new comet C/2007 D1 (LINEAR), observed at rh = 9.7 AU post-perihelion. This comet is particularly interesting because of its quite large perihelion distance (rq = 8.8 AU). Methods: We analyse V and R band images taken at the TNG telescope to characterise the dust coma of the comet

We present the results of a new search for variable stars in the Local Group (LG) isolated dwarf galaxy IC 1613, based on 24 orbits of F475W and F814W photometry from the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope. We detected 259 candidate variables in this field, of which only 13 (all of them bright Cepheids) were

In this paper we search for photometric data of asteroids in the outer region of the Hecuba gap in the Moving Object Catalogue of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to find the spectrophotometric characteristics of small members of this group. We found that the correlation between size and spectral slope previously identified for Cybele asteroids is