We present a study of the X-ray flaring activity of Sgr A⋆ during all the 150 XMM-Newton and Chandra observations pointed at the Milky Way centre over the last 15 years. This includes the latest XMM-Newton and Chandra campaigns devoted to monitoring the closest approach of the very red Brγ emitting object called G2. The entire data set analysed

The starburst galaxy M82 shows a system of Hα-emitting filaments that extend to each side of the galactic disk. We model these filaments as the result of the interaction between the winds from a distribution of super stellar clusters (SSCs). We first derive the condition necessary for producing a radiative interaction between the cluster winds (a

The Mid-Infra-Red Camera w/o LEns (MIRACLE) instrument is the proposed imaging camera for one of the the focal plane instruments on SPICA covering the wavelength range from 5-38 microns. Sub-micro-Jansky sensitivities are expected at wavelengths shortward of 10 microns, and sensitivities of the order of a few micro-Jy in the 10 - 40 micron range

Understanding the connection between normally evolving galaxies and those with extreme nuclear activity, the so-called Active Galactic Nuclei, is a fundamental problem in the study of both galaxy evolution and of AGN. From HST images of the 96 BL Lacertae objects observed in our Cycle 5 and 6 programs, we have determined the absolute magnitudes and

After revisiting the hierarchy problem of the Standard Model and its implications for the scale of New Physics, I consider the finetuning problem in two main scenarios beyond the Standard Model: Supersymmetry (both in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model and alternative models) and Little Higgs models. The main conclusions are that New Physics

At this meeting we presented a spinfoam model in which the fundamental "bubble amplitudes" (the analog of the one-loop corrections in QFT) are finite as the cutoff is removed. The model is a natural variant of the field theoretical formulation of the Barrett-Crane model. As the last, the model is a quantum BF theory plus an implementation of the