The bulge contribution to the inner density profile of a galaxy is well traced by the bulge's NIR surface brightness profile. We map the surface brightness profiles of bulges using HST/NICMOS imaging. Most bulges show nuclear components of 20-200 pc scales, and frequently also unresolved nuclear star clusters (

We investigate the well-known correlations between the dynamical mass-to-light ratio M/L and other global observables of elliptical (E) and lenticular (S0) galaxies. We construct two-integral Jeans and three-integral Schwarzschild dynamical models for a sample of 25 E/S0 galaxies with SAURON integral-field stellar kinematics to about one effective

To explain the currently observed accelerated expansion of the universe, a large number of different theoretical models are presently being discussed. In one way or another, all of these contain `new physics', though at different levels. The big question is how to select out of infinitely many possible models the right one. We here discuss a

We present the results from our non-LTE investigation for neutral carbon, which was carried out to remove potential systematic errors in stellar abundance analyses. The calculations were performed for late-type stars and give substantial negative non-LTE abundance corrections. When applied to observations of extremely metal-poor stars, which within

We have developed TGMETalpha in order to determine T_{eff}, log g, [Fe/H] and [alpha /Fe] for large samples of FGK stars observed at various spectral resolutions. Tests on several hundred echelle spectra of reference stars degraded to low resolution (R=1.000) indicate typical rms precisions of sigma (T_{eff})˜150 K, sigma (logg)˜0.44, sigma ([Fe/H]

We present accurate B, V, R photometry of the Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. The data have been collected with the Wide Field Imager available at 2.2 m ESO/MPI telescope and cover an area of about 100×40 arcmin2 around the Sculptor center. The final catalogue includes 100,000 stars. We found that blue and red Horizontal Branch stars present