APOGEE is a large-scale, NIR, high-resolution (R˜ 20 000) spectroscopic survey of Galactic stars. It is one of the four experiments in SDSS-III. Because APOGEE will observe in the H band, where the extinction is six times smaller than in V, it will be the first survey to pierce through Galactic dust and provide a vast, uniform database of chemical

We present archaeoastronomical results of an interdisciplinary project to study Bronze Age sites of the socalled Cultura de las Motillas in the Spanish region of La Mancha. We find that winter solstice sunrise was of special importance in the funerary  and perhaps religious  practises of these peoples. The impressive megalithic monumental complex

In this paper we present beryllium (Be) abundances in a large sample of 41 extra-solar planet host stars, and for 29 stars without any known planetary-mass companion, spanning a large range of effective temperatures. The Be abundances were derived through spectral synthesis done in standard Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium, using spectra obtained

We present a spectral analysis of a sample of red-sequence galaxies identified by van Dokkum as dry merger remnants and ongoing dry mergers. Kinematics, stellar population absorption features and ionization from emission lines are derived. We find that approximately half of the sample showing strong tidal features have younger stellar populations

Context: .Free-floating planetary-mass objects have masses below the deuterium burning mass limit at about 13 Jupiter masses, and have mostly been found in very young open clusters. Their origin and relationship to stars and brown dwarfs are still a mystery. Aims: .The recent detection by direct imaging of three giant planets at wide separation (50

We have observed a sample of "ordinary" quasars, selected only on the grounds of their relative brightness in the visible, with the Turku Photopolarimeter on the 2.56m Nordic Optical Telescope, on La Palma, Canary Islands. The instrument permits us to obtain simultaneous UBVRI photometry and polarimetry of objects down to 16th magnitude, with the