We report the discovery of WTS-1b, the first extrasolar planet found by the WFCAM Transit Survey, which began observations at the 3.8-m United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in 2007 August. Light curves comprising almost 1200 epochs with a photometric precision of better than 1 per cent to J ˜ 16 were constructed for ˜60 000 stars and searched

The evolution of small systems such as dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) is likely to have been a balance between external environmental effects and internal processes within their own relatively shallow potential wells. Assessing how strong such environmental interactions may have been is therefore an important element in understanding the

In this presentation I will describe the current status of the European Solar Telescope (EST) project. The EST design has a 4-m aperture to achieve both a large photon collection and very high spatial resolution. It includes a multi-conjugate adaptive system integrated in the light path for diffraction-limited imaging. The optical train is

Aims: The role of galaxy mergers in massive galaxy evolution, and in particular to mass assembly and size growth, remains an open question. In this paper we measure the merger fraction and rate, both minor and major, of massive early-type galaxies (M ⋆ ≥ 1011 M&sun;) in the COSMOS field, and study their role in mass and size evolution. Methods: We

A large ground-based spectroscopic and photometric programme has accompanied the asteroseismological photometric observations of the satellite CoRoT since its launch. These simultaneously complementary observations allow to better characterize the targets, identify the modes and recover many other interesting physical information. In this paper

We present measurements of galaxy clustering from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III). These use the Data Release 9 (DR9) CMASS sample, which contains 264 283 massive galaxies covering 3275 square degrees with an effective redshift z = 0.57 and redshift range 0.43 z 0.7