We present here the results of astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic observations leading to the determination of the orbit and dynamical masses of the binary L dwarf 2MASSW J0746425+2000321. High angular resolution observations spread over almost 4 years and obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT)

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) has a unique cluster formation history in that nearly all of its globular clusters were formed either ~13 Gyr ago or less than ~3 Gyr ago. It is not clear what physical mechanism is responsible for the most recent cluster formation episode and thus the mysterious age gap between the LMC clusters. We first present

We estimate the bispectrum of the Very Small Array data from the compact and extended configuration observations released in 2002 December, and compare our results with those obtained from Gaussian simulations. There is a slight excess of large bispectrum values for two individual fields, but this does not appear when the fields are combined. Given

A new reduction and a new analysis of a rich series of high-S/N spectra of the bright star κ Sco is carried out to test the technique of spectral disentangling in the case when one of the components is a non-radial oscillator. We improve the orbital elements of the system and find the basic physical properties of the binary to be Teff = 24 500 K

We report simultaneous X-ray and optical observations of V404 Cyg in quiescence. The X-ray flux varied dramatically by a factor of >~20 during a 60 ks observation. X-ray variations were well correlated with those in Hα, although the latter include an approximately constant component as well. Correlations can also be seen with the optical continuum

The currently available values and confidence limits for Ωm0, H0 and globular cluster ages still indicate that the dark energy that dominates the Universe could also be a form of quintessence or phantom energy. In fact, current cosmological values favor phantom energy. To increase the likelihood of a cosmological constant as dark energy instead of