The determination of chemical abundances from stellar spectra is considered a mature field of astrophysics. Digital spectra of stars are recorded and processed with standard techniques, much like samples in the biological sciences. Nevertheless, uncertainties typically exceed 20% and are dominated by systematic errors. The first part of this paper

Since the discovery of the first planet outside the solar system, the number of planet detections is increasing exponentially. Although we have not been capable of detecting and exploring planets like our own yet, challenging space missions are already being planned for the next decades, and the discovery of earth-like planets is only a matter of

We re-analyze coseismic surface displacement data of the 1908 Messina earthquake, taking into account both correlated and uncorrelated uncertainties, to re-determine the slip distribution on the fault plane. Using a data set of earthquakes occurred at crustal depth in the Messina Straits between July 1988 and December 2004, we evidence a peculiar

Observing the first galaxies formed during the reionisation epoch, i.e. approximately within the first billion years after the Big Bang, remains one of the challenges of contemporary astrophysics. Several efforts are being undertaken to search for such remote objects. Combining the near-IR imaging power of the VLT and the natural effect of strong

We study 1-dimensional coupled map lattices consisting of diffusively coupled Tchebyscheff maps of N-th order. For small coupling constants a we determine the invariant 1-point and 2-point densities of these nonhyperbolic systems in a perturbative way. For arbitrarily small couplings a>0 the densities exhibit a selfsimilar cascade of patterns

Using the low-resolution mode of the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we obtain spectra from 20 spatially-resolved, ultracool dwarfs, eighteen of which belong to nine very low-mass binary systems with known angular separations in the range 0.37 arcsec-0.098 arcsec. For these dwarfs, we derive