Context. Chemical abundances of light elements such as beryllium in planet-host stars allow us to study the planet formation scenarios and/or investigate possible surface pollution processes. Aims: We present here an extension of previous beryllium abundance studies. The complete sample consists of 70 stars that host planets and 30 stars without

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Aims: A recent analysis of polarization measurements of HINODE SOT/SP in the quiet Sun pointed out very complex shapes of Stokes V profiles. Here we present the first classification of the SOT/SP circular polarization measurements with the aim of highlighting exhaustively the whole variety of Stokes V shapes emerging from the quiet Sun. Methods: k

As we celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, we have been working on four different projects with the goal of making astronomy more accessible to people with special needs. These projects are 1) an astronomy book and web site for blind people, 2) an open source software for people with motor disabilities, 3) a planetarium program for the

The functional form of the galaxy-wide stellar initial mass function is of fundamental importance for understanding galaxies. So far this stellar initial mass function (IMF) has been assumed to be identical to the IMF observed directly in star clusters. But because stars form predominantly in embedded groups rather than uniformly distributed over

We present a detailed analysis of all the X-ray data taken by the XMM-Newton satellite of a small sample of five Seyfert 1 galaxies: ESO 359-G19, HE 1143-1810, CTS A08.12, Mkn 110, and UGC 11763. Our aim is to characterize the different components of the material that print the absorption and emission features in the X-ray spectra of these objects