A community working group was formed in October 2016 to consider early release science with the James Webb Space Telescope that broadly benefits the transiting exoplanet community. Over 100 exoplanet scientists worked collaboratively to identify targets that are observable at the initiation of science operations, yield high SNR with a single event

The intensity and polarization of spectral lines encode a wealth of information on the thermodynamic, magnetic, and dynamic properties of the solar atmosphere. In this thesis we have considered the complex radiative transfer problem of modeling, in conditions far from local thermodynamic equilibrium (non-LTE), the Stokes profiles of strong

This work is the first study on the 3D shape of starbursting extremely metal-poor galaxies (XMPs; a galaxy is said to be an XMP if its ionized gas-phase metallicity is less than 1/10 the solar value). A few hundred XMPs have been identified in the local universe primarily through mining the spectroscopic catalog of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We discuss the origin of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) stellar bar by comparing the star formation histories (SFHs) obtained from deep colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) in the bar and in a number of fields in different directions within the inner disc. The CMDs, reaching the oldest main-sequence turn-offs in these very crowded fields, have been

We present the results of photometric and spectroscopic follow-ups of the lowest mass member candidates in the nearest OB association, Upper Scorpius (∼5-10 Myr; 145 ± 17 pc), with the Gran Telescopio de Canarias (GTC) and European Southern Observatory (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT). We confirm the membership of the large majority (>80 per cent)

The view of the Milky Way bulge has evolved considerably over the past decade with recent findings of a multi-component metallicity distribution, the detection of a non-negligible fraction of younger stars and the occurrence of multiple star formation episodes. For more than 5 years, the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment