Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun, hosts a habitable-zone planet (Anglada-Escude' et al. 2016 Nature 536, 437). Several teams have sought Proxima b's transits using ground-based photometry, and have reported tentative transit detections (Liu et al. 2018 AJ 155, 12; Blank et al. 2018 AJ 155, 228; others). Proxima, a modest-sized M-dwarf

NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission is currently on its way to the asteroid (101955) Bennu. Bennu is a primitive asteroid, characterized by a dark surface composed mainly of carbon compounds, organic, and silicates altered by the presence of water. In addition, due to its proximity to the Earth, is classified as a potentially dangerous asteroid (PHA). Among

We present a study of the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using ∼2.2 million red clump (RC) stars selected from the Survey of the MAgellanic Stellar History. To correct for line-of-sight dust extinction, the intrinsic RC color and magnitude and their radial dependence are carefully measured by using internal

This thesis is focused on studying the structure and substructures in dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) satellites of the Milky Way (MW), mainly on the spatial distribution, but also on the internal kinematic and metallicity properties of their stellar component, from the analysis of large samples of individual stars. Due to the proximity of these

Almost several decades after the discovery of the first multiple populations in galactic globular clusters (GC), the debate on their formation is still extremely current and NGC 2808 remains one of the best benchmark to test any scenario for their origin and the evolution. In this work, we focus on the chemical composition of stars belonging to the

The carbon arc in liquid benzene produces carbon dust in addition to phenylacetyene and a number of other molecular products. The carbon dust was analyzed by Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), electron diffraction and Raman spectroscopy, revealing that it consists of a highly structured carbon black with high surface area. The carbon dust from