The quasi-cw stimulated Raman technique is a powerful tool for the determination of collisional broadening and line-mixing parameters, which bear a very direct relationship with the rotational energy transfer rate constants matrix at the state-to-state level. Indeed, the broadening coefficients and the analysis of line-mixing profiles, frequently

The VLT-FLAMES Survey of Massive Stars in the Galaxy, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds was an ESO Large Program (P.I. S. Smartt) aimed at understanding rotational mixing and stellar mass loss in environments of differing metallicity (Z). The overarching goal is to better understand massive star evolution.

We present the first sub-arcsecond resolution two-dimensional stellar kinematics and X-ray observations of the prototypical starburst galaxy NGC 253 which define the position and nature of the galactic nucleus. These observations comprise some of the best probes of the central 300 pc of NGC 253, the nearest massive galaxy undergoing a powerful

We have carried out a long term project to analyse the role played by bars in bulge formation and the formation and evolution of bars from the point of view of their star formation histories and stellar population. To this aim, we have obtained high S/N long-slit spectra of 20 barred galaxies, ranging in morphological types between S0 and Sb

We study Milky Way kinematics using a sample of 18.8 million main-sequence stars with r 20 and proper-motion measurements derived from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and POSS astrometry, including ~170,000 stars with radial-velocity measurements from the SDSS spectroscopic survey. Distances to stars are determined using a photometric-parallax

On June 8th 2009 the SUNRISE mission was successfully launched. This mission consisted of a 1m aperture solar telescope on board of a stratospheric balloon within the Long Duration Balloon NASA program. The flight followed the foreseen circumpolar trajectory over the Artic and the duration was 5 days and 17 hours. One of the two postfocal