Utilizing the unique location of red clump giants on colour-magnitude diagrams obtained from various near-infrared surveys, we derived specific reddening-distance relations towards 119 Galactic novae for which independent reddening measurements are available. Using the derived distance-extinction relation and the independent measurements of

We report the discovery of an optical Einstein ring in the Sculptor constellation, IAC J010127-334319, in the vicinity of the Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. It is an almost complete ring (˜300°) with a diameter of ˜4.5 arcsec. The discovery was made serendipitously from inspecting Dark Energy Camera (DECam) archive imaging data. Confirmation of

We present the study of the colour-magnitude diagram of the cluster Abell 2151 (A 2151), with a particular focus on the low-mass end. The deep spectroscopy with AF2/WYFFOS@WHT and the caustic method enable us to obtain 360 members within 1.3 R200 and absolute magnitude M_r ≲ M_r^{ast }+6. This nearby cluster shows a well defined red sequence up to

We discuss here the results obtained in the determination of effective temperatures and metallicities of late-type stars. We provide the abundances of MgH, TiI and TiII, with a list of selected lines, for the red giant of Arcturus and the metal-poor K subdwarf G 224-58 A. The Sun was used as a template star. After computing synthetic spectra for

A search is presented for the production of two Higgs bosons in final states containing two photons and two bottom quarks. Both resonant and nonresonant hypotheses are investigated. The analyzed data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb-1 of proton-proton collisions at √{s }=8 TeV collected with the CMS detector. Good agreement is

A search is presented for single top quark production in the s channel in proton-proton collisions with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC in decay modes of the top quark containing a muon or an electron in the final state. The signal is extracted through a maximum-likelihood fit to the distribution of a multivariate discriminant defined using