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A dedicated mission to investigate exoplanetary atmospheres represents a major milestone in our quest to understand our place in the universe by placing our Solar System in context and by addressing the suitability of planets for the presence of life. EChO—the Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory—is a mission concept specifically geared for this

We report the discovery of 16 detached M dwarf eclipsing binaries with J 16 mag and provide a detailed characterization of three of them, using high-precision infrared light curves from the WFCAM Transit Survey (WTS). Such systems provide the most accurate and model-independent method for measuring the fundamental parameters of these poorly

We empirically MD test the relation between the SFR(LIR) derived from the infrared luminosity, LIR, and the SFR(Hα) derived from the Hα emission line luminosity using simple conversion relations. We use a sample of 474 galaxies at z = 0.06-0.46 with both Hα detection [from 20k redshift Cosmological Evolution (zCOSMOS) survey] and new far-IR

The target of the NASA DIXI mission, comet 103P/Hartley 2 is in a non-principal-axis (NPA) rotational state that was observed to be varying with time. However, there is still no consensus on the specific NPA rotational state during the 103P/Hartley 2 encounter by DIXI. We analyze the continuum features observed in ground-based images bracketing the

Low-resolution SDSS/SEGUE spectra have been used to study the behavior of the strengths of the CN and CH molecular bands in stars at different evolutionary stages of the open cluster NGC 6791. We find a significant spread in the strengths of the CN bands, more than twice that expected from the uncertainties, although the bimodalities observed in