A rapid timing analysis of Very Large Telescope (VLT)/ULTRACAM (optical) and RXTE (X-ray) observations of the Galactic black hole binary GX339-4 in the low/hard, post-outburst state of 2007 June is presented. The optical light curves in the r',g' and u' filters show slow (~20s) quasi-periodic variability. Upon this is superposed fast flaring

We report the detection of orbital decay in the 12.75-minute, detached binary white dwarf (WD) SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 (hereafter J0651). Our photometric observations over a 13 month baseline constrain the orbital period to 765.206543(55) s and indicate that the orbit is decreasing at a rate of (- 9.8 ± 2.8) × 10-12 s s-1 (or -0.31 ± 0.09 ms yr

Evidence for the rapid internal rotation of the sun obtained from Doppler shift measurements of the Fraunhofer absorption lines is reported. An improved version of the Doppler shift optical resonance spectrometer was used to record the resonantly scattered intensities corresponding to the two wings of the 769.9-nm Fraunhofer absorption lines of

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Context: The CoRoT satellite searches for planets by applying the transit method, monitoring up to 12 000 stars in the galactic plane for 150 days in each observing run. This search is contaminated by a large fraction of false positives, caused by different eclipsing binary configurations that might be confused with a transiting planet. Aims: We

The real-colour images of spiral galaxies reproduced in this Newsletter form part of a new series of such pictures, currently under construction. The original images used have all been obtained with the ING telescopes, mostly with the JKT, some with the INT, and an occasional (H-alpha) image with the WHT. For each galaxy, we have images in the B