Aims: The chemical evolution of galaxies on a cosmological timescale is still a matter of debate despite the increasing number of available data provided by spectroscopic surveys of star-forming galaxies at different redshifts. The fundamental relations involving metallicity, such as the mass - metallicity relation (MZR) or the fundamental

We present observations of the molecular gas in the nuclear environment of three prototypical low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (LLAGNs), based on VLT/SINFONI AO-assisted integral-field spectroscopy of H2 1-0 S(1) emission at angular resolutions of ~0.''17. On scales of 50-150 pc, the spatial distribution and kinematics of the molecular gas are

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large-scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i = 19.9 over 10,000 deg2 to measure

The TASTE project is searching for low-mass planets with the transit timing variation (TTV) technique by gathering high-precision, short-cadence light curves for a selected sample of transiting exoplanets. It has been claimed that the "hot Jupiter" WASP-3b could be perturbed by a second planet. Presenting eleven new light curves (secured at the

We have completed a survey down to R = 15 mag of the stars within a circle of 4 arcmin radius around the nominal center of the remnant of SN 1006, one of the three historical Type Ia supernovae (the other two being SN 1572 and SN 1604), in search of a possible surviving binary companion of the white dwarf whose explosion gave rise to the supernova

We search for massive and compact galaxies (superdense galaxies, hereafter SDGs) at z = 0.03-0.11 in the Padova-Millennium Galaxy and Group Catalogue, a spectroscopically complete sample representative of the general field population of the local universe. We find that compact galaxies with radii and mass densities comparable to high-z massive and