The composition of the most primitive solar system condensates, such as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) and micron-sized corundum grains, show that short-lived radionuclides (SLR), e.g., 26Al, were present in the early solar system. Their abundances require a local or stellar origin, which, however, is far from being understood. We present

Context. The surface layers of the Sun are strongly stratified. In the presence of turbulence with a weak mean magnetic field, a large-scale instability resulting in the formation of nonuniform magnetic structures, can be excited on the scale of many (more than ten) turbulent eddies (or convection cells). This instability is caused by a negative

We report the result of a new Chandra observation of the black hole X-ray transient H 1705-250 in quiescence. H 1705-250 was barely detected in the new ˜50 ks Chandra observation. With five detected counts, we estimate the source quiescent luminosity to be LX ˜ 9.1 × 1030 erg s-1 in the 0.5-10 keV band (adopting a distance of 8.6 kpc). This value

KIC 3429637 (HD 178875) is a δ Sct star whose light curve shows continuous pulsational amplitude growth in Kepler mission photometry. Analysis of the three largest amplitude peaks in the Fourier transform indicates different growth rates for all three. We have ruled out instrumental causes, and determine the amplitude growth to be intrinsic to the

We give an overview of the spectral reduction pipeline that will be used to process the data of the échelle spectrograph of the SONG-OT telescope node of the SONG (Stellar Observations Network Group) network on Tenerife. In particular, we focus on the iodine absorption cell technique to derive precise radial velocity measurements. The telescope and

The basic idea of optical pumping, for which Alfred Kastler received the 1966 Nobel Prize in physics, is that the absorption and scattering of light that is near-resonant with an optical transition can produce large population imbalances among the magnetic sublevels of atomic ground states as well as in excited states. The degree of this