Context: .Free-floating planetary-mass objects have masses below the deuterium burning mass limit at about 13 Jupiter masses, and have mostly been found in very young open clusters. Their origin and relationship to stars and brown dwarfs are still a mystery. Aims: .The recent detection by direct imaging of three giant planets at wide separation (50

We have observed a sample of "ordinary" quasars, selected only on the grounds of their relative brightness in the visible, with the Turku Photopolarimeter on the 2.56m Nordic Optical Telescope, on La Palma, Canary Islands. The instrument permits us to obtain simultaneous UBVRI photometry and polarimetry of objects down to 16th magnitude, with the

To better understand how planets form, it is important to study planet occurrence rates as a function of stellar mass. However, estimating masses of field stars is often difficult. Over the past decade, a controversy has arisen about the inferred occurrence rate of gas-giant planets around evolved intermediate-mass stars - the so-called `retired A

We report on the first asteroseismic analysis of solar-type stars observed by Kepler. Observations of three G-type stars, made at one-minute cadence during the first 33.5 days of science operations, reveal high signal-to-noise solar-like oscillation spectra in all three stars: About 20 modes of oscillation can clearly be distinguished in each star

We report on the ground-based follow-up program of spectroscopic and photometric observations of solar-like asteroseismic targets for the Kepler space mission. These stars constitute a large group of more than a thousand objects which are the subject of an intensive study by the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium Working Group 1 (KASC WG-1)

We present astrometric monitoring data of the binary brown dwarf DENIS-P J1228.2-1547. The data have been obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope over a time span of 5.5 yr, and confirm that DENIS-P J1228.2-1547 is indeed a common proper motion, i.e., physical, binary. The data cover about 1/8th of the binary orbit, indicating an orbital period of