The Planetary Nebulae Luminosity Function (PNLF) is an important standard candle on the extragalactic distance ladder. Its use is based on the empirical evidence that the [OIII]5007Å luminosity of PNe reaches a maximum value, M*, invariant with galaxy type and with a small dependence on metallicity. The PNLF method, applied to more than 50 galaxies

Most planetary nebulae (PNe) show beautiful, axisymmetric morphologies despite their progenitor stars being essentially spherical. Angular momentum provided by a close binary companion is widely invoked as the main agent that would help eject an axisymmetric nebula, after a brief phase of engulfment of the secondary within the envelope of the

The importance of long-period binaries for the formation and evolution of planetary nebulae is still rather poorly understood, which in part is due to the lack of central star systems that are known to comprise such long-period binaries. Here, we report on the latest results from the on-going Mercator-HERMES survey for variability in the central

Thick discs are nearly ubiquitous components of the discs of present-day galaxies. It has been proposed that a fraction of their stars have been accreted. Here, we aim to find whether accretion of satellites is the main formation mechanism of thick discs. To do so, we observed a sample of eight nearby edge-on galaxies with the Multi-Unit

The GTC Adaptive Optics (GTCAO) system is the general Adaptive Optics facility that will provide diffraction limited images in the near-infrared to the GTC telescope. At Day 1 it will consist of a single deformable mirror with 21×21 actuators (373 useful actuators), conjugated to the telescope pupil and a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor with 20×20

Context. This paper is based on the multi-band (ugri) Fornax Deep Survey (FDS) with the VLT Survey Telescope (VST). We study bright early-type galaxies (mB ≤ 15 mag) in the 9 square degrees around the core of the Fornax cluster, which covers the virial radius (Rvir ˜ 0.7 Mpc). Aims: The main goal of the present work is to provide an analysis of the