Accretion disc winds are observed in accreting black holes across the full range of masses. In stellar-mass black holes, X-ray winds have been recently established as a fundamental property of their most radiatively efficient phases, the so-called soft states, impacting on the entire accretion process. However, these hot and powerful winds are scarcely observed during the dimmer hard states, where most of the black holes of the Universe exist and kinetic feedback from jets dominates. The disappearance of the wind is a matter of strong debate and has been suggested to be related to different

We present the detection of fullerenes C 60 and C 70 in the star-forming region IC 348 of the Perseus molecular cloud. Mid-IR vibrational transitions of C 60 and C 70 in emission are found in Spitzer IRS spectra of individual stars (LRLL 1, 2, 58), in the averaged spectrum of three other cluster stars (LRLL 21, 31, and 67) and in spectra obtained at four interstellar locations distributed across the IC 348 region. Fullerene bands appear widely distributed in this region with higher strength in the lines of sight of stars at the core of the cluster. Emission features consistent with the three

Galaxy formation remains one of the major open problems in astrophysics today. There is a wide range of mechanisms that control the transformation of gas into stars in galaxies, compounded by the cosmological evolution of structure, along with complex feedback processes. An observational approach targets general trends in large distributions of galaxies. On a diagram plotting colour versus mass, the distribution of galaxies gets split into a bimodal structure, featuring a region of red, passively-evolving galaxies (termed the red sequence), and a so-called blue cloud, made up of star-forming

Early-type galaxies (ETGs) were historically considered as ‘boring’ objects by astronomers. This galaxy category encompasses lenticular and elliptical galaxies, which were thought as morphologically featureless systems with no star formation and therefore of little interest. However, with the advent of powerful integral field spectrographs and deep photometric images, ETGs have demonstrated not to be such ‘boring’ systems, but complex galaxies with a variety of dynamical, photometric, and stellar population’s properties. In fact, a major question of current astrophysics is still to determine