Context. The possible existence of a continuum encompassing the diversity of explosive stellar deaths, ranging from ordinary supernovae (SNe; lacking any sign of a relativistic outflow) to relativistic hypernovae associated with energetic long duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), is under intense debate. In this context, the supernova SN 2008D

We used all the SDSS DR7 spectroscopic sample as the starting base. Then, the selection of objects was based on Sanchez Almeida et al. (2010ApJ...714..487A) who performed an unsupervised automated classification of all the SDSS spectra. Basically, we chose galaxies with redshift below 0.25, and with good photometric data and clean spectra, meaning

Early-type galaxies (ETGs) satisfy a now classic scaling relation Re ∝ σ1.2eI-0.8e, the Fundamental Plane (FP; Djorgovski & Davis 1987; Dressler et al. 1987), between their size, stellar velocity dispersion and mean surface brightness. A significant effort has been devoted in the past twenty years to try to understand why the coefficients of the

Prompted by the recent report of increased Swift/BAT activity from the neutron star X-ray transient XTE J1701-462 (ATel #3028), the source was observed for ~1.4 ks with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer on 2010 November 13 11:16 UTC. The average count rate from the PCA was 2.0+/-0.2 cts/s/PCU, consistent with the count rate from the Galactic ridge

Context. The design of modern instruments does not only imply thorough studies of instrumental effects but also a good understanding of the scientific analysis planned for the data. Aims: We investigate the reliability of Milne-Eddington (ME) inversions of high-resolution magnetograph measurements such as those to be obtained with the Imaging

By isolating the red clump giant population in the color-magnitude diagrams and inverting their star counts, we can obtain directly the density distribution of the old stellar population along the line of sight. We have applied this method to several near infrared surveys and obtained information on the disc, bulge and long bar. The disc is well