ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) is being studied as part of the joint ESA/NASA AIDA mission for launch in 2020. AIDA's primary mission is to investigate the effect of a kinetic impactor on the secondary component of the binary asteroid 65803 Didymos in late 2022. AIM will characterise the Didymos system and monitor the response of the binary

Aims: Most hot Jupiters are expected to spiral in toward their host stars because the angular momentum of the orbital motion is transferred to the stellar spin. Their orbits can also precess as a result of planet-star interactions. Calculations show that both effects might be detected for the very-hot exoplanet WASP-12 b using the method of precise

For the first time, we obtain chemical evolution models (CEMs) for Tucana and Cetus, two isolated dwarf spheroidal galaxies of the Local Group. The CEMs have been built from the star formation histories (SFHs) and the metallicity histories, both obtained independently by the Local Cosmology from Isolated Dwarfs (LCID) project from deep colour

We provide a new collection of spectra of 35 carbon stars obtained with the ESO/VLT X-Shooter instrument as part of the X-Shooter Spectral Library project. The spectra extend from 0.3 μm to 2.4 μm with a resolving power above ~8000. The sample contains stars with a broad range of (J - K) color and pulsation properties located in the Milky Way and

We use ASAD2, the new version of ASAD (Analyzer of Spectra for Age Determination), to obtain the age and reddening of 27 Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) clusters from full fitting of integrated spectra using different statistical methods [χ2 and Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test] and a set of stellar population models including GALAXEV and MILES. We show

Aims: We present a study of the Be/X-ray binary system V 0332+53 with the main goal of characterizing its behaviour mainly during the intermediate-luminosity X-ray event in 2008. In addition, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the behaviour of the donor companion by including optical data from our dedicated campaign starting in 2006