This volume presents the lectures from the sixteenth Winter School of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, which was dedicated to extrasolar planets. Research into extrasolar planets is one of the most exciting fields of astrophysics, and the past decade has seen research leap from speculations on the existence of planets orbiting other stars

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We estimated the Galactic model parameters for a set of 36 high-latitude fields included in the currently available Data Release 5 (DR 5) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), to explore their possible variation with the Galactic longitude. The thick disc scaleheight moves from ˜550 pc at 120°

We introduce a new model for dark energy in the Universe in which a small cosmological constant is generated by ordinary electromagnetic vacuum energy. The corresponding virtual photons exist at all frequencies but switch from a gravitationally active phase at low frequencies to a gravitationally inactive phase at higher frequencies via a Ginzburg

We discuss discrimination techniques and their quantitative efficiency that allow the separation of high energy electron/photon and muon primaries originated in cosmic ray extensive air showers impinging the ground. The experimental setup used in this study is detailed elsewhere in this volume (Sanchez et al.). Several approaches are analyzed

Fluorescent X-rays from the surfaces of airless planetary bodies in the inner solar system have been measured by instruments on several spacecraft. X-ray emission follows photoionisation by incident solar X-rays and charged particles and reveals the elemental composition of the surface. Analyses of X-ray spectra obtained by orbiting spacecraft, use