We have performed an abundance analysis for F- and G- dwarfs of the Galactic thick-disc component. A sample of 176 nearby (d= 70 per cent taken as certain membership, we assigned 95 stars to the thick disc, 13 to the thin disc, and 20 to the halo. The remaining 48 stars in the sample cannot be assigned with reasonable certainty to one of the three

Galaxies are not distributed randomly throughout space but are instead arranged in an intricate ``cosmic web'' of filaments and walls surrounding bubble-like voids. There is still no compelling observational evidence of a link between the structure of the cosmic web and how galaxies form within it. However, such a connection is expected on the

We have obtained deep HST imaging of two candidate dwarf systems in the nearby M81 Group, DDO 44 and UGC 4998. Both are isolated, low surface brightness systems, but with likely very different star formation histories based on their mean colors and color fluctuations. The color-magnitude diagrams of these galaxies have been used to estimate their

This paper reports the first theoretical study on the collisional depolarization and polarization transfer for rovibrational levels of diatomic molecules in the infinite-order-sudden approximation. As an application, we compute depolarization and polarization transfer rates for rotational levels J = 1,..., 99 within the vibrational quantum numbers

Aims.This work presents a uniform and homogeneous study of chemical abundances of refractory elements in 101 stars with and 93 without known planetary companions. We carry out an in-depth investigation of the abundances of Si, Ca, Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Na, Mg and Al. The new comparison sample, spanning the metallicity range -0.70 [Fe/H] 0.50

We present the [ X/H] trends as a function of the elemental condensation temperature TC in 88 planet host stars and in a volume-limited comparison sample of 33 dwarfs without detected planetary companions. We gathered homogeneous abundance results for many volatile and refractory elements spanning a wide range of T_C, from a few dozen to several