The GEO 600 gravitational wave detector uses advanced technologies including signal recycling and monolithic fused-silica suspensions to achieve a sensitivity close to the kilometre scale LIGO and VIRGO detectors. As soon as the design sensitivity of GEO 600 is reached, the detector will be operated as part of the worldwide network to acquire data

Of all the large interferometric gravitational-wave detectors, the German/British project GEO600 is the only one which uses dual recycling. During the four weeks of the international S4 data-taking run it reached an instrumental duty cycle of 97% with a peak sensitivity of 7 × 10-22 Hz-1/2 at 1 kHz. This paper describes the status during S4 and

Actively star-forming galaxies are an important component of the local universe. They provide a unique opportunity to study the violent star-formation events that were much more prevalent at higher redshifts, probably triggered by the merging of galaxies. Advances arising from new satellite and ground-based observations, as well as sophisticated

Aims.IRAS 08339+6517 is a luminous infrared and Lyα-emitting starburst galaxy that possesses a dwarf companion object at a projected distance of 56 kpc. An H I tidal tail has recently been detected between both galaxies, suggesting that about 70% of the neutral gas has been ejected from them.Methods.We present deep broad-band optical images

We present surface spot maps of the K2V primary star in the pre-cataclysmic variable binary system, V471 Tau. The spot maps show the presence of large high-latitude spots located at the sub-white dwarf longitude region. By tracking the relative movement of spot groups over the course of four nights (eight rotation cycles), we measure the surface

Velocity oscillations in sunspot umbrae have been measured simultaneously in two spectral lines: the photospheric Si I λ10827 line and the chromospheric He I λ10830 multiplet. From the full Stokes inversion of temporal series of spectropolarimetric observations, we retrieved, among other parameters, the line-of-sight velocity temporal variations at