Late-type spiral galaxies are thought to be the dynamically simplest type of disk galaxy and our understanding of their properties plays a key role in galaxy formation and evolution scenarios. The low surface brightness (LSB) galaxy UGC 7321, a nearby, isolated, ``superthin'' edge-on galaxy, is an ideal object to study these purely disk-dominated

We present low and high resolution long-slit spectra of three bipolar planetary nebulae (PNe) with bright central cores: A 79, He 2-428 and M 1-91. He 2-428 and M 1-91 have high density (from 103.3 to 106.5 cm-3) unresolved nebular cores that indicate that strong mass loss/exchange phenomena are occurring close to their central stars. An F0 star is

Context: We present the CoRoT light curve of the β Cep star HD 180642, assembled during the first long run of the space mission, as well as archival single-band photometry. Aims: Our goal is to analyse the detailed behaviour present in the light curve and interpret it in terms of excited-mode frequencies. Methods: After describing the noise

We present the first radial velocity curve of the companion star to BW Cir that demonstrates the presence of a black hole in this X-ray transient that recorded outbursts in 1987 and 1997 (and possibly 1971-1972). We identify weak absorption features corresponding to a G0-5 III donor star, strongly veiled by a residual accretion disk that

Time series of high-resolution images of the complex ac-tive region NOAA 10786 are studied. The observations were performed in G-band (430.5 nm) and in the nearby continuum (463.3 nm), on July 9, 2005 at the Swedish 1-meter Solar Telecope (SST) in La Palma. Granular proper motions in the surroundings of the sunspots have been quantified. A large

We define blue E/S0 galaxies as objects having a clear early-type morphology on the HST/ACS images but with a blue rest-frame color. We isolate this way 210 IAB 22 blue early-type galaxies with M* / Msun > 1010 in the COSMOS field located in three redshift bins (0.2 z 0.55, 0.55 z 0.8, 0.8 z 1.4) and study their properties (number density