Context. The Ge:Ga detectors used in the PACS spectrograph onboard the Herschel space telescope react to changes of the incident flux with a certain delay. This generates transient effects on the resulting signal which can be important and last for up to an hour. Aims: The paper presents a study of the effects of transients on the detected signal

Atmosphere above sunspots is abundant with different types of waves. Among these waves are running penumbral waves in the chromosphere, quasi-periodic oscillations in the lower coronal loops, and recently reported running waves in sunspots’ photosphere, all of which were interpreted as magnetoacoustic waves by some authors. Are these waves in

K-band galaxy number counts (GNCs) exhibit a slope change at K˜ 17.5 mag not present in optical bands. To unveil the nature of this feature we have derived the contribution of different galaxy types to the total K-band GNCs at 0.3 2) and evolved passively since then cannot predict the slope change, whereas models that impose a late definitive

Based on observations of HII regions and on the new computations of the recombination coefficients of the HeI lines by Porter el al. we obtain a primordial helium abundance by mass of Y_P = 0.2446 ± 0.0029. We consider thirteen sources of error for the Y_P determination; some of them are mainly due to systematic effects, while the rest are mainly

Dwarf galaxies (Mb>-18) are important because of their cosmological interest as tests of hierarchical theories. The formation of these galaxies is still an open question but red dwarf galaxies are preferentially located in high density environments, indicating that they are end-products of galaxy transformations in clusters. Deep spectroscopic