This paper describes the Fifth Data Release (DR5) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). DR5 includes all survey quality data taken through 2005 June and represents the completion of the SDSS-I project (whose successor, SDSS-II, will continue through mid-2008). It includes five-band photometric data for 217 million objects selected over 8000 deg2

The Dharma Planet Survey (DPS) aims to monitor about 150 nearby very bright FGKM dwarfs (within 50 pc) during 2016-2020 for low-mass planet detection and characterization using the TOU very high resolution optical spectrograph (R ≈ 100 000, 380-900 nm). TOU was initially mounted to the 2-m Automatic Spectroscopic Telescope at Fairborn Observatory

The mechanism proposed by Kormendy (1984) for the formation of counterrotating cores in elliptical galaxies is investigated using self-consistent numerical simulations of mergers between a high- and a low-luminosity elliptical galaxies. The conditions for a counterrotation to appear are determined, observational properties of the remnants are

It is well known that newly formed planetary systems undergo processes of orbital reconfiguration and planetary migration. As a result, planets or protoplanetary objects may accrete onto the central star, being fused and mixed into its external layers. If the accreted mass is sufficiently high and the star has a sufficiently thin convective

Context. The ongoing Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey is using FLAMES at the VLT to obtain high-quality medium-resolution Giraffe spectra for about 105 stars and high-resolution UVES spectra for about 5000 stars. With UVES, the Survey has already observed 1447 FGK-type stars. Aims: These UVES spectra are analyzed in parallel by several state-of

This paper discusses synthetic horizontal branches constructed from a grid of horizontal-branch (HB) evolutionary tracks with the alpha-elements enhanced by a factor of 5 with respect to the solar-scaled mixture and various surface helium and heavy-element abundances. The luminosity log L(3.83) and the luminosity-to-mass ratio A(3.83) of the ZAHB