Early-type galaxies are thought to be among the oldest known stellar systems, and as such have experienced the full diversity of evolutionary mechanisms at work...
Understanding Circumnuclear Star Formation in Spiral Galaxies
We are attempting to learn the circumstances under which bursts of star formation may be triggered around the nuclei of many nearby spiral galaxies. By...
Understanding Galactic planetary nebulae with precise/reliable nebular abundances
We compare recent precise/reliable nebular abundances - as derived from high-quality optical spectra and the most recent ICFs - in a sample of Galactic...
Understanding Infrared Galaxy Populations: the SWIRE Legacy Survey
We discuss spectral energy distributions, photometric redshifts, redshift distributions, luminosity functions, source-counts and the far infrared to optical...
Planes of satellites are observed in the Milky Way and Andromeda, and recent observations claim their presence as well in other nearby galactic systems...
Understanding sub-stellar populations using wide-field infrared surveys
This paper discusses benchmark brown dwarfs in various environments, and focuses on those in wide binary systems. We present a summary of the recently...
Understanding the chemical evolution of C, O, N, Ne, S, Cl and Ar in the Milky Way using H II regions
We use a sample of 33 H II regions with high and intermediate resolution spectroscopy to analyze the radial distribution of different elements in the Milky Way...
Understanding the evolution of close white dwarf binaries
In this white paper we stressed the importance of ultraviolet (high- resolution) and optical (low- and high-) spectroscopy to understand of evolution of close...