In a statistical study of the decay of individual sunspots based on DPR data we find that the mean instantaneous area decay rate is related to the spot radius r and the maximal radius r0 as D=C r/r0, C=32.0 +- 0.26 MSH/day. This implies that sunspots on the mean follow a parabolic decay law; the traditional linear decay law is excluded by the data

Diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) trace warm neutral and weakly ionized diffuse interstellar medium (ISM). Here we present a dedicated, high signal-to-noise spectroscopic survey of two of the strongest DIBs, at 5780 and 5797 Å, in optical spectra of 666 early-type stars in the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds, along with measurements of the atomic

Aims: By means of optical integral field spectroscopy observations, we aim to differentiate and characterize the starburst component in the blue compact dwarf (BCD) galaxy Mrk 1418. In particular we propose to study the stellar and ionized gas morphology, to investigate the ionization mechanism(s) acting in the interstellar medium, and to derive

We constrain the ratio of black hole (BH) mass to total stellar mass of type-1 active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the COSMOS survey at 1 < z < 2. For 10 AGNs at mean redshift z ~ 1.4 with both Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/ACS and HST/NICMOS imaging data, we are able to compute the total stellar mass M *,total, based on rest-frame UV-to-optical host

From an analysis of almost 2000 Galaxy Evolution Explorer images of galaxies with morphological types ranging from E to Sab, we have found a significant subset (28 per cent) that show ultraviolet (UV) emission outside R25. We have obtained Hα imaging of 10 such galaxies, and found that their star formation rates are similar in the UV and in Hα

Aims. We have performed a comprehensive multiwavelength analysis of a sample of 20 starburst galaxies that show the presence of a substantial population of very young massive stars, most of them classified as Wolf-Rayet (WR) galaxies. In this paper, the second of the series, we present the results of the analysis of long-slit intermediate