Present-day massive galaxies are composed mostly of early-type objects. It is unknown whether this was also the case at higher redshifts. In a hierarchical assembling scenario the morphological content of the massive population is expected to change with time from disc-like objects in the early Universe to spheroid-like galaxies at present. In this

The mass of a galaxy is the most important parameter to understand its structure and evolution. The total mass we can infer by constructing dynamical models that fit the motion of the stars and gas in the galaxy. The dark matter content then follows after subtracting the luminous matter inferred from colors and/or spectra. Here, we present the mass

Recent success in explaining several properties of the dusty torus around the central engine of active galactic nuclei has been gathered with the assumption of clumpiness. The properties of such clumpy dusty tori can be inferred by analysing spectral energy distributions (SEDs), sometimes with scarce sampling given that large aperture telescopes

Determining fundamental properties of stars through stellar modeling has improved substantially due to recent advances in asteroseismology. Thanks to the unprecedented data quality obtained by space missions, particularly CoRoT and Kepler, invaluable information is extracted from the high-precision stellar oscillation frequencies, which provide

A sample of 10 nearby intermediate-type active galactic nuclei (AGNs) drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is presented. The aim of this work is to provide estimations of the black hole (BH) mass for the sample galaxies from the dynamics of the broad-line region. For this purpose, a detailed spectroscopic analysis of the objects was done. Using

In just one year of operation, the SDSS-III/APOGEE survey has amassed the largest collection ever of high-resolution, H-band spectra for Be-type emission-line stars. Of the 300 fibers used in each APOGEE observation, 35 are reserved for hot, telluric-absorption standard stars that are selected from the bluest stars (in J-Ks color) in each field and