A population of very faint X-ray binaries has been discovered in the last years thanks to the improvement in sensitivity and resolution of the new generations of X-ray missions. These systems show anomalously low luminosities, below 10^{36} ergs/sec, challenging our understanding of accretion physics and binary evolution models, and thereby opening

A population of very faint X-ray binaries has been discovered in the last years thanks to the improvement in sensitivity and resolution of the new generations of X-ray missions. These systems show anomalously low luminosities, below 10^{36} ergs/sec, challenging our understanding of accretion physics and binary evolution models, and thereby opening

We searched for variable stars in Hydra II, one of the recently discovered ultra-faint dwarf satellites of the Milky Way, using gri time-series obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile. We discovered one RR Lyrae star in the galaxy which was used to derive a distance of 154±8 kpc to this system

The stellar velocity ellipsoid (SVE) quantifies the amount of velocity dispersion in the vertical, radial and azimuthal directions. Since different disk heating mechanisms (e.g. spiral arms, giant molecular clouds, mergers, etc) affect these components differently, the SVE can constrain the sources of heating in disk galaxies. At present the 3D

In the era of big surveys, integral-field units (IFUs) are starting to emerge as one of the most popular instruments to carry out forefront astronomy on large sets of objects and/or large portions of the sky. In this contribution I will highlight some of the most important efforts conducted with this kind of instrumentation, with emphasis on the

Previous numerical studies had apparently ruled out the possibility that flares in galaxy discs could give rise to the apparent breaks in their luminosity profiles when observed edge-on. However the studies have not, until now, analysed this hypothesis systematically using realistic models for the disc, the flare, and the bulge. We revisit this