We present observations and initial analysis from a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Cycle 19 program using STIS to obtain the first co-spatial, UV–optical spectra of 10 Galactic planetary nebulae (PNs). Our primary objective was to measure the critical emission lines of carbon and nitrogen with unprecedented signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) and spatial

We present the first high spectral resolution abundance analysis of two newly discovered Galactic globular clusters, namely, Mercer 5 and 2MASS GC02, residing in regions of high interstellar reddening in the direction of the Galactic center. The data were acquired with the Phoenix high-resolution near-infrared echelle spectrograph at Gemini South

This paper describes the Second Public Data Release (DR2) of the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area (CALIFA) survey. The data for 200 objects are made public, including the 100 galaxies of the First Public Data Release (DR1). Data were obtained with the integral-field spectrograph PMAS/PPak mounted on the 3.5 m telescope at the Calar Alto

The discrepancy between abundances computed using optical recombination lines and collisionally excited lines is a major unresolved problem in nebular astrophysics. Here, we show that the largest abundance discrepancies are reached in planetary nebulae with close binary central stars. We illustrate this using deep spectroscopy of three nebulae with

The relation between galaxies and dark matter haloes is of vital importance for evaluating theoretical predictions of structure formation and galaxy formation physics. We use hydrodynamic cosmological simulations of the Local Group to show that the widely used method of abundance matching based on dark matter only simulations fails at the low-mass

Context. The bar pattern speed (Ωb) is defined as the rotational frequency of the bar, and it determines the bar dynamics. Several methods have been proposed for measuring Ωb. The non-parametric method proposed by Tremaine & Weinberg (1984, ApJ, 282, L5; TW) and based on stellar kinematics is the most accurate. This method has been applied so far