The European Space Agency's Gaia mission is revolutionising our understanding on how the Milky Way, the spiral galaxy we inhabit, has formed and evolved. Gaia is measuring the apparent luminosities, colours, positions, motions, and the chemical composition of an unprecedentedly large number of individual stars in our Galaxy. In particular, combining apparent luminosities with distances to these stars, here we have computed the intrinsic luminosity of 24 million stars within a sphere of 6500 light years around our Sun. Comparing such luminosities and colours with accurate models of stars we

The black holes at the centres of galaxies are the most mysterious objects in the Universe, not only because of the huge quantities of material within them, millions of times the mass of the Sun, but because of the incredibly dense concentration of matter in a volume no bigger than that of our Solar System. When they capture matter from their surroundings they become active, eventually giving rise to the ejection of huge amounts of energy. It is however difficult to detect the black hole during these capture episodes because the event is rare. We detected long and narrow dust filaments

The solar coronal heating problem originated almost 80 years ago and remains unsolved. A plausible explanation lies in mechanisms based on magnetic wave energy dissipation. Currently, several linear and nonlinear wave damping models have been proposed. The advent of space instrumentation has led to the creation of catalogues containing the properties of a large number of loop oscillation events. When the damping ratio of the oscillations is plotted against their oscillation amplitude, the data are scattered forming a cloud with a triangular shape. Larger amplitudes correspond in general to