The eclipsing X-ray pulsar XTE J1855-026 (Corbet & Mukai 2002, ApJ 577, 923) has been unambiguously identified by a recent Swift observation (Romano et al., ATel #1875) with the reddened early-type star proposed as candidate counterpart by Verrecchia et al. (ATel #102). High-quality spectra of the counterpart taken in August 2003 with the 4.2-m WHT

M 87 is the only known non blazar radio galaxy to emit very high energy (VHE) gamma-rays. During a monitoring program of M 87, a rapid flare in VHE gamma-rays was detected by the MAGIC telescope in early 2008. The flux was found to be variable above 350 GeV on atimescaleas short as 1 day at a significance level of 5.6σ. The highest measured flux

Context: The CoRoT space mission routinely provides high-precision photometric measurements of thousands of stars that have been continuously observed for months. Aims: The discovery and characterization of the first very massive transiting planetary companion with a short orbital period is reported. Methods: A series of 34 transits was detected in

Does a merging event always precede AGN activity? In this starting PhD project, we will try to address this question by quantifying the distortions and interaction signatures that can be detected on a sample of AGN galaxies from the ACS-COSMOS survey. In order to do this, we will investigate and combine all the different available galaxy

We propose the ultimate survey of the distribution of stellar structure in the nearby universe using IRAC's 3.6 and 4.5 micron channels. Deep observations of the stellar mass distribution, down to 0.1 Msun per sq. pc for a sample of ~2,300 nearby (d

We derive the fundamental plane (FP) relation for a sample of 1430 early-type galaxies in the optical (r band) and the near-infrared (K band), by combining SDSS and UKIDSS data. With such a large, homogeneous data set, we are able to assess the dependence of the FP on the wave band. Our analysis indicates that the FP of luminous early-type galaxies