The GTC project office is continuing to develop the plans for the commissioning of the GTC. The commissioning will start before first light, and will continue until well after normal science operations begin. The aim of the commissioning is to convert a series of subsystems into a single instrument which is capable of delivering high quality

We report on the first joint search for gravitational waves by the TAMA and LIGO collaborations. We looked for millisecond-duration unmodeled gravitational-wave bursts in 473 hr of coincident data collected during early 2003. No candidate signals were found. We set an upper limit of 0.12 events per day on the rate of detectable gravitational-wave

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We calculate the emissivity for the direct URCA process in strongly magnetized, degenerate matter in neutron stars, under beta -equilibrium. We show that, if the magnetic field is large enough for protons and electrons to be confined to their ground Landau levels, the field-free threshold condition on proton concentration no longer holds, and

The authors have shown how two extensive stellar spectral libraries of very high quality obtained with telescopes of small size can help us in determining the main properties of the stellar populations of the galaxies (e.g., age; metallicity; IMF; element ratios). New libraries with larger spectral ranges and wider stellar atmospheric parameters

As part of an ongoing program to test Newton’s law of gravity in the low acceleration regime using globular clusters, we present here new results obtained for NGC 6171. Combining VLT spectra for 107 stars with data from the literature, we were able to trace the velocity dispersion profile up to 16 pc from the cluster center, probing accelerations