Aims: We try to identify ultra-cool dwarfs from the seventh Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS DR7) with SDSS i-z and r-z colors. We also obtain proper motion data from SDSS, 2MASS, and UKIDSS and improve spectral typing from SDSS and 2MASS photometric colors. Methods: We selected ultra-cool dwarf candidates from the SDSS DR7 with

Polarized light provides the most reliable source of information at our disposal for diagnosing the physical properties of astrophysical plasmas, including the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the solar atmosphere. Here we formulate and solve the 3D radiative transfer problem of the linear polarization of the solar continuous radiation, which is

A new method to obtain the thermodynamic coefficients in an analytic and exact form for applications in radiative and convective transport in thermodynamic equilibrium for stellar atmosphere and plasma spectroscopy is developed. The resulting exact expressions are formed by sums of the degrees of ionization of the components of the system

The bright Type II-plateau supernova (SN) 2004dj occurred within the young, massive stellar cluster Sandage-96 in a spiral arm of NGC 2403. New multiwavelength observations obtained with several ground-based and space-based telescopes were combined to study the radiation from Sandage-96 after SN 2004dj faded away. Sandage-96 started to dominate the

We report the detection of a radial velocity companion to the extremely low-mass white dwarf (WD) LP400-22. The radial velocity of the WD shows variations with a semiamplitude of 119 km s-1 and a 0.98776 day period, which implies a companion mass of M >= 0.37 M sun. The optical photometry rules out a main-sequence companion. Thus the invisible

We present Spitzer 7.6-14.5 μm spectra of ULAS J003402.77-005206.7 and ULAS J133553.45+113005.2, two T9 dwarfs with the latest spectral types currently known. We fit synthetic spectra and photometry to the near- through mid-infrared energy distributions of these dwarfs and that of the T8 dwarf 2MASS J09393548-2448279. We also analyze near-infrared