Context: Inversion techniques are the most powerful methods to obtain information about the thermodynamical and magnetic properties of solar and stellar atmospheres. In the recent years, we have witnessed the development of highly sophisticated inversion codes that are now widely applied to spectro-polarimetric observations. The majority of these

The anisotropy in the angular distribution of the fusion-fission and quasifission fragments for the 16O + 238U , 19F + 208Pb and 32S + 208Pb reactions is studied by analyzing the angular-momentum distributions of the dinuclear system and compound nucleus which are formed after capture and complete fusion, respectively. The orientation angles of the

We have derived a new H_{β} absorption index definition, which is fully optimized as an age indicator for old and intermediate-aged stellar populations. Rather than using stellar spectra, we employed theoretical SEDs at moderately high resolution for simple stellar populations of different ages and metallicities. The new index, which is virtually

We introduce the new Galactic Plane Hα survey IPHAS, present our PNe selection method, and discuss two examples of very distant new PNe.

We report on the unprecedented red supergiant (RSG) population of a massive young cluster, located at the base of the Scutum-Crux Galactic arm. We identify candidate cluster RSGs based on 2MASS photometry and medium-resolution spectroscopy. With follow-up high-resolution spectroscopy, we use CO band-head equivalent width and high-precision radial

We present first results from our search for brown dwarf and giant planet companions around G and K type stars in the Upper Sco OB association. Our survey is designed to detect companions as faint as I=20 about 2 arcsec from the star. This sensitivity corresponds to 10MJ at 300 AU according to current evolutionary models. The host stars were