The Gaia mission will have a profound impact on our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way. Gaia is providing an exhaustive census of stellar parallaxes, proper motions, positions, colors and radial velocities, but also leaves some glaring holes in an otherwise complete data set. The radial velocities measured with the on

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A theory of the cosmological constant Λ is currently out of reach. Still, one can start from a set of axioms that describe the most desirable properties a cosmological constant should have. This can be seen in certain analogy to the Khinchin axioms in information theory, which fix the most desirable properties an information measure should have and

We consider the Two Higgs Doublet Model (2HDM) of type III which leads to Flavour Changing Neutral Currents (FCNC) at tree level. In the framework of this model we calculate the NLO contribution for b->s gamma and the branchings for the meson decays B^+ -> l^+ u. We examine the limits on the new parameters lambda_{bb} and M_{H^pm}. We take into

The number of magnetic stars detected among massive stars is small; nevertheless, the role played by the magnetic field in stellar evolution cannot be disregarded. Links between line profile variability, enhancements/depletions of surface chemical abundances, and magnetic fields have been identified for low-mass B-stars, but for the O-type domain

We study the effect of Faraday rotation due to a uniform magnetic field on the polarization of the cosmic microwave background. Scalar fluctuations give rise only to parity-even E-type polarization of the cosmic microwave background. However in the presence of a magnetic field, a nonvanishing parity-odd B-type polarization component is produced