The Visual Monitoring Camera (VMC) is a small camera onboard Mars Express, initially intended to provide visual confirmation of the separation of the Beagle 2 lander. In 2007, a few years after the end of its original mission, VMC was turned on again to obtain full-disk images of Mars for outreach purposes (Ormston et al., 2011). As VMC obtained

We report the discovery of an eccentric hot Neptune and a non-transiting outer planet around TOI-1272. We identified the eccentricity of the inner planet, with an orbital period of 3.3 days and R p,b = 4.1 ± 0.2 R ⊕, based on a mismatch between the observed transit duration and the expected duration for a circular orbit. Using ground-based radial

Context. Massive binaries hosting a black hole (OB+BH) represent a critical phase in the production of BH mergers in the context of binary evolution. In spite of this, such systems have so far largely avoided detection. Single-lined spectroscopic (SB1) O-type binaries are ideal objects to search for elusive BH companions. Moreover, SB1 binaries

High-resolution (HR) ground-based spectrographs have drastically improved the investigation of exoplanet atmospheres. In this scenario the near-infrared (0.9-2.45 μm) HR (R /sim 50000) spectrograph GIANO-B mounted at the Nasmyth-B focus of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) telescope is playing an important role.With the simultaneous detection

Massive early-type galaxies (ETGs) show several strong CO absorption features in their H- and K-band spectra that cannot be explained by state-of-the-art stellar population models. For many years, the disagreement has been attributed to the presence of intermediate-age stellar components that are dominated by stars in the asymptotic giant branch

During last decade there have been a tremendous increase in detection and characterization of low-mass exoplanets, reaching the Earth size and mass domain, in particular those orbiting M dwarf stars, due to their smaller sizes and masses, resulting in planet larger transit amplitude and radial velocity signals. Extremely precise instruments such as