Searches for planets around giants represent an essential complement to 'traditional' surveys, because they furnish information about properties of planetary systems around stars that are the descendants of the A-F main sequence (MS) stars with masses as high as ~5 M⊙. As the stars evolve off the MS, their effective temperatures and rotation rates

We present azimuthally averaged radial profiles of R-band surface brightness for a complete sample of 47 early-type, unbarred galaxies, as a complement to our previous study of early-type barred galaxies. Following very careful sky subtraction, the profiles can typically be determined down to brightness levels well below 27 mag arcsec-2 and in the

The Very Small Array (VSA) detected a cold spot in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) towardsthe Corona Borealis supercluster of galaxies. The origin of this spot remains unclear as itis not obviously associated to any known cluster of galaxies. We present here recent observationalresults (GTC, WHT, SDSS) and theoretical (N-body simulations)

The Kepler mission has made an important observation: the first detection of photons from a terrestrial planet by observing its phase curve (Kepler-10b). This opens a new field in exoplanet science: the possibility of obtaining information about the atmosphere and surface of rocky planets, objects of prime interest. In this Letter, we apply the

The Stellar Observations Network Group (SONG) is an internationalnetwork project aiming to place eight 1 m robotic telescopes around the globe,with the primary objectives of studying stellar oscillations and planetsusing ultra-precision radial velocity measurements.The prototype of SONG will be installed and running at the Observatoriodel Teide by

The Tarantula FLAMES Survey is an ESO Large Program aimed at disentangling the role of binarity in the evolution of massive stars. We have multiepoch, high resolution and SNR observations of about 1000 massive OB stars in 30 Dor secured with the FLAMES spectrograph at VLT. In this poster we present a general view of the project and the main