Context: The pioneer space mission for photometric planet searches, CoRoT, steadily monitors about 12 000 stars in each of its fields of view. Transit candidates can be detected early in the processing of the data and before the end of a run of observation. Aims: We report the detection of the first planet discovered by CoRoT and characterizing it

In this Letter we demonstrate that the puzzling bright peak in the luminosity function of the white dwarf (WD) cooling sequence of NGC 6791 can be naturally accounted for if ~34% of the observed WDs are WD+WD binary systems. Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is

The main objective of the Penn State/Toruń Centre for Astronomy search for planets around evolved stars is the detection of planetary systems around massive, evolved stars. We are also interested in the evolution of these systems on stellar evolution timescales. In this paper we present our approach to determine the basic physical parameters of our

Aims: We present an analysis of the star formation properties of field galaxies within the local volume out to a recession velocity limit of 3000 km s-1. Methods: A parent sample of 863 star-forming galaxies is used to calculate a B-band luminosity function. This is then populated with star formation information from a subsample of 327 galaxies

In principle, dark galaxies in the dwarf-galaxy mass range may be detectable through additional, small-scale image splitting of quasars that are already known to be multiply-imaged on arcsecond scales. Here, we derive the image separations expected for dark galaxies with density profiles favoured by recent N-body simulations. The results are

We report on the status of the Canarias InfraRed Camera Experiment (CIRCE), a near-infrared visitor instrument for the 10.4 meter Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). Besides functioning as a 1-2.5 micron imager with a 3.4×3.4 arcminute field-of-view and 0.10 arsecond pixels, CIRCE will have the capacity for low and moderate resolution grism