We report on the spectroscopic transit of the massive hot-Jupiter CoRoT-Exo-2b observed with the high-precision spectrographs SOPHIE and HARPS. By modeling the radial velocity anomaly occurring during the transit due to the Rossiter-McLaughlin (RM) effect, we determine the sky-projected angle between the stellar spin and the planetary orbital axis

Context: The CoRoT mission, a pioneer in exoplanet searches from space, has completed its first 150 days of continuous observations of ~12 000 stars in the galactic plane. An analysis of the raw data identifies the most promising candidates and triggers the ground-based follow-up. Aims: We report on the discovery of the transiting planet CoRoT-Exo

Context: The pioneer space mission for photometric planet searches, CoRoT, steadily monitors about 12 000 stars in each of its fields of view. Transit candidates can be detected early in the processing of the data and before the end of a run of observation. Aims: We report the detection of the first planet discovered by CoRoT and characterizing it

In this Letter we demonstrate that the puzzling bright peak in the luminosity function of the white dwarf (WD) cooling sequence of NGC 6791 can be naturally accounted for if ~34% of the observed WDs are WD+WD binary systems. Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is

The main objective of the Penn State/Toruń Centre for Astronomy search for planets around evolved stars is the detection of planetary systems around massive, evolved stars. We are also interested in the evolution of these systems on stellar evolution timescales. In this paper we present our approach to determine the basic physical parameters of our

Aims: We present an analysis of the star formation properties of field galaxies within the local volume out to a recession velocity limit of 3000 km s-1. Methods: A parent sample of 863 star-forming galaxies is used to calculate a B-band luminosity function. This is then populated with star formation information from a subsample of 327 galaxies