Binary central stars of planetary nebula are a valuable tool in understanding common envelope evolution. In these cases both the resulting close binary system and the expanding envelope (the planetary nebula) can be studied directly. In order to compare observed systems with common envelope evolution models we need to determine precise physical

The low-mass X-ray binary Aquila X-1 is one of the most active neutron star X-ray transients. Despite its relatively bright quiescent optical counterpart, the detection of its companion has been hampered by the presence of a nearby interloper star. Using the Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observations in the Near Infrared (SINFONI) on the Very

This paper describes the CMS trigger system and its performance during Run 1 of the LHC. The trigger system consists of two levels designed to select events of potential physics interest from a GHz (MHz) interaction rate of proton-proton (heavy ion) collisions. The first level of the trigger is implemented in hardware, and selects events containing

We present baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale measurements determined from the clustering of 1.2 million massive galaxies with redshifts 0.2 z 0.75 distributed over 9300 deg2, as quantified by their redshift-space correlation function. In order to facilitate these measurements, we define, describe, and motivate the selection function for

We explore the cosmological implications of anisotropic clustering measurements in configuration space of the final galaxy samples from Data Release 12 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We implement a new detailed modelling of the effects of non-linearities, bias and redshift-space distortions that can be

We present the stellar kinematic maps of a large sample of galaxies from the integral-field spectroscopic survey CALIFA. The sample comprises 300 galaxies displaying a wide range of morphologies across the Hubble sequence, from ellipticals to late-type spirals. This dataset allows us to homogeneously extract stellar kinematics up to several