The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III/Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (SDSS-III/APOGEE) is a high resolution H-band (1.51-1.68 μ) spectroscopic survey covering all Galactic populations within the Milky Way. During the survey's three-year lifetime, we plan to target 100,000 Galactic stars, mostly red giants, from within the disk

With the aim of investigating galaxies with two strong simultaneous starbursts, we have extracted a sample of galaxies with double-peaked emission lines in their global spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectral data base. We then fitted the emission lines Hα, Hβ, [O III]λ5007, [N II]λ6584, [S II]λ6717 and [S II]λ6731 of 129 spectra

We present several lines of evidence, based on different kinds of observations, and we conclude that it is likely that rotational fission has occurred for a fraction of the known trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). It is also likely that a number of binary systems have formed from that process in the trans-Neptunian belt. We show that Haumea is

With the aim of constructing accurate two-dimensional maps of the stellar mass distribution in nearby galaxies from Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies 3.6 and 4.5 μm images, we report on the separation of the light from old stars from the emission contributed by contaminants. Results for a small sample of six disk galaxies (NGC 1566

By utilizing satellite-based estimations of the distribution of clouds, we have studied Earth's large-scale cloudiness behavior according to latitude and surface types (ice, water, vegetation, and desert). These empirical relationships are used here to reconstruct the possible cloud distribution of historical epochs of Earth's history such as the

We report observations of HD 80606 using the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias and the Optical System for Imaging and low Resolution Integrated Spectroscopy (OSIRIS) tunable filter imager. We acquired very high precision, narrow-band photometry in four bandpasses around the K I absorption feature during the 2010 January transit of HD 80606b and