We have used the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to detect and measure ~5300 stars in a single intracluster field in the Virgo Cluster. By performing F606W and F814W photometry on these stars, we have determined their metallicity distribution function and constrained the types of stars present in this portion of Virgo's

We present echelle spectrophotometry of the blue compact dwarf galaxy NGC 5253 obtained with the VLT UVES. We have measured the intensities of a large number of permitted and forbidden emission lines in four zones of the central part of the galaxy. We detect faint C II and O II recombination lines, the first time that these are unambiguously

We report the results of spectroscopic observations, obtained with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph, of eight planetary nebulae (PNe) in the dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy NGC 147, a companion of M31. The physico-chemical properties of the six brightest PNe were derived using both the empirical ICF method and photoionization modelling with

We review the properties of young superstellar clusters and the impact that their evolution has in their host galaxies. In particular we look at the development of strong isotropic winds emanating from massive clusters, capable of disrupting the remains of the parental cloud as well as causing the large-scale restructuring of the surrounding ISM

We give two examples of spiral galaxies that show non-circular gas motions in the inner kiloparsecs, from SAURON integral field spectroscopy. We use harmonic decomposition of the velocity field of the ionized gas to study the underlying mass distribution, employing linear theory. The higher order harmonic terms and the main kinematic features of

As previously shown, the special relativistic dynamical equation of the Lorentz force type can be regarded as a consequence of a succession of space-time dependent infinitesimal Lorentz boosts and rotations. This insight indicates that the Lorentz-Force-like equation has a fundamental meaning in physics. We show how this result may be spinorially