Fullerenes have been observed in several astronomical objects since the discovery of C 60 in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) spectrum of the planetary nebula (PN) Tc 1. It has been suggested that the carriers of the broad unidentified infrared (UIR) plateau features, such as the 9-13 μm emission feature (12 μm hereafter), may be related to the formation

The mergers of binary compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes are of central interest to several areas of astrophysics, including as the progenitors of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) 1, sources of high-frequency gravitational waves (GWs) 2 and likely production sites for heavy-element nucleosynthesis by means of rapid neutron capture (the r

Detections of transiting planets from the upcoming PLATO mission are expected to face significant contamination from contaminating eclipsing binaries, resulting in false positives. To counter this, a ground-based programme to acquire time-critical photometry is pursued. Its principal aim is to obtain time-series observations of the planet candidate

Context. Anomalous Cepheids (ACEPs) are intermediate-mass metal-poor pulsators that are mostly discovered in dwarf galaxies of the Local Group. However, recent Galactic surveys, including the Gaia Data Release 3, found a few hundred ACEPs in the Milky Way. Their origin is only poorly understood. Aims: We aim to investigate the origin and evolution

The recent era of large, ground-based abundance surveys has unraveled the chemical structures of our Milky Way galaxy. The most striking abundance feature is the alpha-abundance bimodality. The low-alpha stars are younger (1-8 Gyr) while the high-alpha stars are older (8-12 Gyr) and have a thicker distribution. While there are a number of models

We report 850 μm continuum polarization observations toward the filamentary high-mass star-forming region NGC 2264, taken as part of the B-fields In STar forming Regions Observations large program on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. These data reveal a well-structured nonuniform magnetic field in the NGC 2264C and 2264D regions with a prevailing