This paper discusses benchmark brown dwarfs in various environments, and focuses on those in wide binary systems. We present a summary of the recently discovered T dwarf population from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey, and describe the constraints that it places on our knowledge of the sub-stellar initial mass function. We also present some exciting

We report on the discovery of a hot Jupiter-type exoplanet, CoRoT-17b, detected by the CoRoT satellite. It has a mass of 2.43 ± 0.30 MJup and a radius of 1.02 ± 0.07 RJup, while its mean density is 2.82 ± 0.38 g/cm3. CoRoT-17b is in a circular orbit with a period of 3.7681 ± 0.0003 days. The host star is an old (10.7 ± 1.0 Gyr) main-sequence star

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We present the Young Exoplanet Transit Initiative (YETI), in which we use several 0.2 to 2.6-m telescopes around the world to monitor continuously young (≤100 Myr), nearby (≤1 kpc) stellar clusters mainly to detect young transiting planets (and to study other variability phenomena on time-scales from minutes to years). The telescope network enables

The Tarantula Survey is an ESO Large Programme which has obtained multi-epoch spectroscopy of over 1,000 massive stars in the 30 Doradus region of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The assembled consortium will exploit these data to address a range of fundamental questions in both stellar and cluster evolution.

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