ELMER is an optical instrument for the GTC designed to observe between 3650 and 10000 Armstrong. The observing modes for the instrument at Day One shall be: Imaging, Long Slit Spectroscopy, Mask-multi-object spectroscopy, Slit-less multi-object spectroscopy, Fast Photometry and Fast short-slit spectroscopy. It will be installed at the Nasmyth-B

Context. Blue compact dwarf (BCD) galaxies are low-luminosity, low-metal content dwarf systems undergoing violent bursts of star formation. They present a unique opportunity to probe galaxy formation and evolution and to investigate the process of star formation in a relatively simple scenario. Spectrophotometric studies of BCDs are essential to

Not Available

We discuss the method, and potential systematic effects therein, used for measuring the mass of stellar-mass black holes in X-ray binaries. We restrict our discussion to the method that relies on the validity of Kepler's laws; we refer to this method as the dynamical method. We briefly discuss the implications of the mass distribution of stellar

Local UV-bright galaxies in the Kiso survey include clumpy systems with kiloparsec-size star complexes that resemble clumpy young galaxies in surveys at high redshift. We compare clump masses and underlying disks in several dozen galaxies from each of these surveys to the star complexes and disks of normal spirals. Photometry and spectroscopy for

We study the preferred environments of z ˜ 0 massive relic galaxies (M⋆ ≳ 1010 M⊙ galaxies with little or no growth from star formation or mergers since z ˜ 2). Significantly, we carry out our analysis on both a large cosmological simulation and an observed galaxy catalogue. Working on the Millennium I-WMAP7 simulation we show that the fraction of