The star 55 Cancri was one of the first known exoplanet hosts and each of the planets in this system is remarkable. Planets b and c are in a near 1:3 resonance. Planet d has a 14.5 year orbit, and is one of the longest known orbital periods for a gas giant planet. Planet e has a mass of 8 M? and transits this bright star, providing a unique case

ESPRESSO (Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations) is a VLT ultra-stable high-resolution spectrograph that will be installed in Paranal Observatory in Chile at the end of 2017 and offered to the community by 2018. The spectrograph will be located at the Combined Coudé Laboratory of the VLT and will be able to

When an exoplanet passes behind its host star, we can measure the time of the occultation, its depth, and its color. In this chapter we describe how these observables can be used to deduce physical characteristics of the planet such as its averaged dayside emission, departures from uniform disk illumination, or a precise measurement of the orbital

Brown dwarfs are substellar objects unable to stably fuse hydrogen in their interior. Since the discovery of the first brown dwarf in an open cluster, namely, Teide 1 (Rebolo et al. Nature 377:129-131, 1995), many searches for substellar objects have been carried out in young stellar clusters and associations, such as Pleiades, Orion, Upper

Exoplanet research is carried out at the limits of the capabilities of current telescopes and instruments. The studied signals are weak and often embedded in complex systematics from instrumental, telluric, and astrophysical sources. Combining repeated observations of periodic events, simultaneous observations with multiple telescopes, different

In a framework where galaxies form hierarchically, extended stellar haloes are predicted to be an ubiquitous feature around Milky Way-like galaxies and to consist mainly of the shredded stellar component of smaller galactic systems. The type of accreted stellar systems are expected to vary according to the specific accretion and merging history of