Several techniques are achieving nowadays the precision levels required to detect few-Earth-mass planets, but still a fruitful path needs to be explored in order to detect a planet like the Earth orbiting inside the habitable zone of a star. We summarize the different approaches followed to reach this goal, and highlight their achievements.

Context. The “mass discrepancy” in massive O stars represents a long-standing problem in stellar astrophysics with far-reaching implications for the chemical and dynamical feedback in galaxies. Aims: Our goal is to investigate this mass discrepancy by comparing state-of-the-art model masses with model-independent masses determined from eclipsing

We present the online and the offline data reduction system for OSIRIS, the optical multi-mode instrument for GranTeCan. The software is written in Python and invokes PyRAF tasks which have been optimized for the instrument. We review the characteristics of the instrument and of the software. We will also present the improvements which are foreseen

We discuss the first results of the Fermi-GBM all-sky search for X-ray bursts. The very large field of view and X-ray response of the Fermi-GBM make it a unique instrument to study rare, bright and short-lived X-ray bursts. We are performing a systematic search that exploits such capabilities. We present results on long/intermediate type I X-ray

Magnetic fields in the solar chromosphere play a key role in the energy transfer and dynamics of the solar atmosphere. Yet a direct observation of the chromospheric magnetic field remains one of the greatest challenges in solar physics. While some advances have been made for observing the Zeeman effect in strong chromospheric lines, the effect is

Based on observations collected at the Italian Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG), operated on the island of La Palma by the Centro Galileo Galilei of the INAF (Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica) at the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.