Despite thousands of extrasolar planets discovered to date, the dominant mechanisms forming planets and the timescales of planetary migration and atmospheric evaporation remain to be probed observationally. To shed light on these mechanisms, we performed a combined photometric and spectroscopic analysis of several young transiting systems at

Mercator Array for Radial VELocities (MARVEL) is an ensemble of four 80-cm off the shelf telescopes feeding a single stabilised high-resolution (R>90 000) echelle spectrograph. The facility is currently under construction and will be located on La Palma (Canary Islands), next to the Mercator telescope. The facility is designed such that the four

According to dynamo theory, stars with convective envelopes efficiently generate surface magnetic fields, which manifest as magnetic activity in the form of starspots, faculae, and/or flares, when their rotation period is shorter than their convective turnover time. Most red giants, having undergone significant spin down while expanding, have slow

The Mirror-slicer Array for Astronomical Transients (MAAT) is an IFU now being manufactured for the OSIRIS spectrograph on the 10.4-m GRANTECAN (GTC) telescope at La Palma. It is based on the Advanced Image Slicer (AIS) concept as are MUSE and KMOS on the VLT (among many others). Very significant changes to the design had to be made due in part to

Observational and theoretical evidence supports the idea that the influence of supermassive black hole growth on galaxies extends from the central tens of parsecs (localised, transient impact) to hundreds of kiloparsecs (global, long-term impact). Because of the completely different scales of these localised and global effects on the host galaxies

We present detailed forecasts for the constraints on the characteristics of primordial magnetic fields (PMFs) generated prior to recombination that will be obtained with the LiteBIRD satellite. The constraints are driven by some of the main physical effects of PMFs on the CMB anisotropies: the gravitational effects of magnetically-induced