Supermassive black holes with masses of millions to billions of solar masses are commonly found in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers seek to image jet formation using radio interferometry but still suffer from insufficient angular resolution. An alternative method to resolve small structures is to measure the time variability of their emission

Using N-body simulations, we study the origin of prolate rotation observed in the kinematic data for Andromeda II (And II), a dwarf spheroidal satellite of M31. We propose an evolutionary model for the origin of And II involving a merger between two discy dwarf galaxies with different disc scalelengths. The dwarfs are placed on a radial orbit

The CoRoT and Kepler space missions have commenced a golden era in the field of asteroseismology. The precise and long-term uninterrupted photometric time series from space, now available for thousands of stars, enable the detection of low-amplitude frequencies, revealing new and surprising pulsational results. From the following overview of the

We present Chandra, XMM-Newton, and Swift observations of the quiescent neutron star in the transient low-mass X-ray binary MAXI J0556-332. Observations of the source made during outburst (with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer) reveal tracks in its X-ray color-color and hardness-intensity diagrams that closely resemble those of the neutron-star Z

We present Herschel far-IR photometry and spectroscopy as well as ground-based CO observations of an intermediate redshift (0.21 1 is already significant by z ~ 0.3.

The topic of this thesis is the study of the morphology, kinematics and star formation of nearby galaxies, aiming to clarify a number of long-standing open questions about their formation, evolution and physical properties. First, I have addressed the star formation and its distribution across the Hubble sequence of galaxies. In particular, I have