The soft X-ray transient GU Mus has been detected by XMM-Newton in the quiescent state. The source is very faint, with a 0.5-10.0 keV unabsorbed flux of =~ 1.1 x 10-14 ergs cm-2 s-1. The spectra is well fit by an absorbed powerlaw with a photon index of alpha = 1.6 +/- 0.4, close to the value seen when the source was in the low/hard state in Aug

We present a new 40ks XMM observation of the black hole X-ray nova V404 Cyg in quiescence. Its quiescent spectra can be best fitted by a power-law with slope Gamma 2 as found previously. V404 Cyg was roughly equal in luminosity compared to the previous observation of Chandra with variability of a factor of 4 during the observation. We find no

IAUC 7494 available at Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams.

IAUC 7022 available at Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams.

Context. Magnetic fields play a fundamental role in star formation processes and the best method to evaluate their intensity is to measure the Zeeman effect of atomic and molecular lines. However, a direct measurement of the Zeeman spectral pattern from interstellar molecular species is challenging due to the high sensitivity and high spectral

We explain the linear polarization of the Ca ii infrared triplet observed close to the edge of the solar disk. In particular, we demonstrate that the physical origin of the enigmatic polarizations of the 866.2 and 854.2nm lines lies in the existence of atomic polarization in their metastable 2D3/2 , 5/2 lower levels, which produces differential