Context. Waves in the magnetized solar atmosphere are one of the favourite means of transferring and depositing energy into the solar corona. The study of waves brings information not just on the dynamics of the magnetized plasma, but also on the possible ways in which the corona is heated. Aims: The identification and analysis of the phase

A population of very faint X-ray binaries has been discovered in the last years thanks to the improvement in sensitivity and resolution of the new generations of X-ray missions. These systems show anomalously low luminosities, below 10^{36} ergs/sec, challenging our understanding of accretion physics and binary evolution models, and thereby opening

A population of very faint X-ray binaries has been discovered in the last years thanks to the improvement in sensitivity and resolution of the new generations of X-ray missions. These systems show anomalously low luminosities, below 10^{36} ergs/sec, challenging our understanding of accretion physics and binary evolution models, and thereby opening

We searched for variable stars in Hydra II, one of the recently discovered ultra-faint dwarf satellites of the Milky Way, using gri time-series obtained with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile. We discovered one RR Lyrae star in the galaxy which was used to derive a distance of 154±8 kpc to this system

The stellar velocity ellipsoid (SVE) quantifies the amount of velocity dispersion in the vertical, radial and azimuthal directions. Since different disk heating mechanisms (e.g. spiral arms, giant molecular clouds, mergers, etc) affect these components differently, the SVE can constrain the sources of heating in disk galaxies. At present the 3D

In the era of big surveys, integral-field units (IFUs) are starting to emerge as one of the most popular instruments to carry out forefront astronomy on large sets of objects and/or large portions of the sky. In this contribution I will highlight some of the most important efforts conducted with this kind of instrumentation, with emphasis on the