We introduce a model which uses semi-analytic techniques to trace formation and evolution of galaxy disks in their cosmological context. For the first time we model the growth of gas and stellar disks separately. In contrast to previous work we follow in detail the angular momentum accumulation history through the gas cooling, merging and star formation processes. Our model successfully reproduces the stellar mass–radius distribution and gas-to-stellar disk size ratio distribution observed locally. We also investigate the dependence of clustering on galaxy size and find qualitative agreement with observation. There is still some discrepancy at small scale for less massive galaxies, indicating that our treatment of satellite galaxies needs to be improved.

Magnetic reconnection plays a central role in the interpretation of a wide variety of observed solar, space, astrophysical, and laboratory plasma phenomena. The relatively recent discovery that reconnection is common at thin current sheets in the solar wind opens up a new laboratory for studying this fundamental plasma process and its after-effects. Here we provide a brief overview of some of the new insights on reconnection derived from observations of reconnection exhaust jets in the solar wind.

The Universal Transit Modeller (UTM) is a light-curve simulator for all kinds of transiting or eclipsing configurations between arbitrary numbers of several types of objects, which may be stars, planets, planetary moons, and planetary rings. Applications of UTM to date have been mainly in the generation of light-curves for the testing of detection algorithms. For the preparation of such test for the Corot Mission, a special version has been used to generate multicolour light-curves in Corot's passbands. A separate fitting program, UFIT (Universal Fitter) is part of the UTM distribution and may be used to derive best fits to light-curves for any set of continuously variable parameters. UTM/UFIT is written in IDL code and its source is released in the public domain under the GNU General Public License.

We present the results of a systematic analysis of the solid state features identified in the circumstellar environments of a large sample of evolved stars with ISO/SWS and Spitzer/IRS spectroscopy. The sample includes several hundred stars with a wide variety of progenitor masses evolving from the early AGB phase to the PN stage. Our observations are used to propose an evolutionary scheme in which the results obtained can be interpreted as a consequence of the nucleosynthesis processes that take place in this short phase of the stellar evolution, in particular the third dredge-up and hot bottom burning, which in turn are also strongly modulated by the stellar metallicity.

As we have noted before, the WG-IR was created following a Joint Commission Meeting at the IAU General Assembly in Baltimore in 1988, a meeting that provided both diagnosis and prescription for the perceived ailments of infrared photometry at the time. The results were summarized in Milone (1989). The challenges involve how to explain the failure to systematically achieve the milli-magnitude precision expected of infrared photometry and an apparent 3% limit on system transformability. The proposed solution was to re-define the broadband Johnson system, the passbands of which had proven so unsatisfactory that over time effectively different systems proliferated although bearing the same JHKLMNQ designations; the new system needed to be better positioned and centered in the atmospheric windows of the Earth's atmosphere, and the variable water vapour content of the atmosphere needed to be measured in real time to better correct for atmospheric extinction.

We perform a set of high-resolution, fully self-consistent dissipationless N-body simulations to investigate the influence of cold dark matter (CDM) substructure on the dynamical evolution of thin galactic disks. Our method combines cosmological simulations of galaxy-sized CDM halos to derive the properties of substructure populations and controlled numerical experiments of consecutive subhalo impacts onto initially-thin, fully-formed disk galaxies. We demonstrate that close encounters between massive subhalos and galactic disks since z ~ 1 should be common occurrences in ΛCDM models. In contrast, extremely few satellites in present-day CDM halos are likely to have a significant impact on the disk structure. One typical host halo merger history is used to seed controlled N-body experiments of subhalo-disk encounters. As a result of these accretion events, the disk thickens considerably at all radii with the disk scale height increasing in excess of a factor of 2 in the solar neighborhood. We show that interactions with the subhalo population produce a wealth of distinctive morphological signatures in the disk stars, many of which resemble those being discovered in the Milky Way (MW), M31, and in other disk galaxies, including: conspicuous flares; bars; low-lived, ring-like features in the outskirts; and low-density, filamentary structures above the disk plane. These findings highlight the significant role of CDM substructure in setting the structure of disk galaxies and driving galaxy evolution.

Magnetic helicity (H) is an ideal magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) invariant that quantifies the twist and linkage of magnetic field lines. In magnetofluids with low resistivity, H decays much less than the energy, and it is almost conserved during times shorter than the global diffusion timescale. The extended solar corona (i.e., the heliosphere) is one of the physical scenarios where H is expected to be conserved. The amount of H injected through the photospheric level can be reorganized in the corona, and finally ejected in flux ropes to the interplanetary medium. Thus, coronal mass ejections can appear as magnetic clouds (MCs), which are huge twisted flux tubes that transport large amounts of H through the solar wind. The content of H depends on the global configuration of the structure, then, one of the main difficulties to estimate it from single spacecraft in situ observations (one point - multiple times) is that a single spacecraft can only observe a linear (one dimensional) cut of the MC global structure. Another serious difficulty is the intrinsic mixing between its spatial shape and its time evolution that occurs during the observation period. However, using some simple assumptions supported by observations, the global shape of some MCs can be unveiled, and the associated H and magnetic fluxes (F) can be estimated. Different methods to quantify H and F from the analysis of in situ observations in MCs are presented in this review. Some of these methods consider a MC in expansion and going through possible magnetic reconnections with its environment. We conclude that H seems to be a ‘robust’ MHD quantity in MCs, in the sense that variations of H for a given MC deduced using different methods, are typically lower than changes of H when a different cloud is considered. Quantification of H and F lets us constrain models of coronal formation and ejection of flux ropes to the interplanetary medium, as well as of the dynamical evolution of MCs in the solar wind.

We discuss the four basic methods to derive HII region abundances in metal-poor galaxies by presenting a few recent results obtained with these methods. We end up by commenting on the yet unsolved problem of temperature fluctuations in HII regions, which may plague abundance determinations, as well as the discrepancy between abundances derived from recombination lines and collisionally excited lines, to which inhomogeneous chemical composition might be the explanation.

We present the latest results of a theoretical project aimed at investigating the properties of thermally-pulsing asymptotic giant branch (TP-AGB) stars in different host systems. For this purpose, we have recently calculated calibrated synthetic TP-AGB tracks — covering a wide range of metallicities (0.0001 ≤ Z ≤ 0.03) up to the complete ejection of the envelope by stellar winds (Marigo & Girardi 2007) — and used them to generate new sets of stellar isochrones (Marigo et al. 2008). The latter are converted to about 25 different photometric systems, including the mid-infrared filters of Spitzer and AKARI as the effect of circumstellar dust from AGB stars is taken into account. First comparisons with AGB data in the MC field and stellar clusters are discussed.

We have used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to measure proper motion of the globular cluster NGC 6656 (M22) with respect to the background bulge stars and its internal velocity dispersion profile. With the space velocity of (Π, Θ, W) = (184±3, 209±14, 132±15) km s−1, we also calculate the orbit of the cluster. The central velocity dispersion in both components of the proper motion of cluster stars is 16.99 km s−1. We derive the mass-to-ration (M/L)∼1.7 which is relatively higher than the past works.

The light curve of an exoplanetary transit can be used to estimate the planetary radius and other parameters of interest. Because accurate parameter estimation is a non-analytic and computationally intensive problem, it is often useful to have analytic approximations for the parameters as well as their uncertainties and covariances. Here we give such formulas, for the case of an exoplanet transiting a star with a uniform brightness distribution. When limb darkening is significant, our parameter sets are still useful, although our analytic formulas underpredict the covariances and uncertainties.

Using a new multi-wavelength technique applied on the solar corona SOHO/EIT images containing magnetoacoustic waves (EIT waves), we constrain the wave phase velocity and, as well, some β-model, height related considerations for the vertical extent of the wave, applied on the particular EIT wave triggered by the eruptive event from 15th of August, 2001.

We introduce the SMC in space and time, a large coordinated space and ground-based program to study star formation processes and history, as well as variable stars, structure, kinematics and chemical evolution of the whole SMC. Here, we present the Colour-Magnitude Diagrams (CMDs) resulting from HST/ACS photometry, aimed at deriving the star formation history (SFH) in six fields of the SMC. The fields are located in the central regions, in the stellar halo, and in the wing toward the LMC. The CMDs are very deep, well beyond the oldest Main Sequence Turn-Off, and will allow us to derive the SFH over the entire Hubble time.

Several approaches have been followed for the analysis of the light curves of transiting extra-solar planets. From simple approximate algorithms and synthetic models to semi-analytical complete solutions. The different alternatives are discussed with their strengths and weaknesses. Analytical expressions can also provide a deeper insight into the main system parameters from the measurement of a few strategic points describing the shape of the light curve.

Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) are solar eruptions into interplanetary space of as much as a few billion tons of plasma, with embedded magnetic fields from the Sun's corona. These perturbations play a very important role in solar–terrestrial relations, in particular in the spaceweather. In this work we present some preliminary results of the software development at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México to performe Remote MHD Numerical Simulations. This is done to study the evolution of the CMEs in the interplanetary medium through a Web–based interface and the results are store into a database. The new astrophysical computational tool is called the Mexican Virtual Solar Observatory (MVSO) and is aimed to create theoretical models that may be helpful in the interpretation of observational solar data.

The LMC clusters with similar ages to the Milky Way open clusters are in general more metal-poor and more populous than the latter, being located close enough to allow their stellar content to be well resolved. Therefore, they are unique templates of simple stellar population (SSP), being crucial to calibrate models describing the integral light as well as to test the stellar evolution theory. With this in mind we analyzed HST/WFPC2 (V, B − V) colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of 15 populous LMC clusters with ages between ~0.3 Gyr and ~4 Gyr using different stellar evolutionary models. Following the approach described by Kerber, Santiago & Brocato (2007), we determined accurate and self-consistent physical parameters (age, metallicity, distance modulus and reddening) for each cluster by comparing the observed CMDs with synthetic ones generated using isochrones from the PEL and BaSTI libraries. These determinations were made by means of simultaneous statistical comparison of the main-sequence fiducial line and the red clump position, offering objective and robust criteria to select the best models. We compared these results with the ones obtained by Kerber, Santiago & Brocato (2007) using the Padova isochrones. This revealed that there are significant trends in the physical parameters due to the choice of stellar evolutionary model and treatment of convective core overshooting. In general, models that incorporate overshooting presented more reliable results than those that do not. Furthermore, the Padova models fitted better the data than the PEL and BaSTI models. Comparisons with the results found in the literature demonstrated that our derived metallicities are in good agreement with the ones from the spectroscopy of red giants. We also confirmed that, independent of the adopted stellar evolutionary library, the recovered 3D distribution for these clusters is consistent with a thick disk roughly aligned with the LMC disk as defined by field stars. Finally, we also provide new estimates of distance modulus to the LMC center, that are marginally consistent with the canonical value of 18.50 mag.

We use a series of high-resolution N-body simulations of a ‘Milky-Way’ halo, coupled to semi-analytic techniques, to study the formation of our own Galaxy and of its stellar halo. Our model Milky Way galaxy is a relatively young system whose physical properties are in quite good agreement with observational determinations. In our model, the stellar halo is mainly formed from a few massive satellites accreted early on during the galaxy's lifetime. The stars in the halo do not exhibit any metallicity gradient, but higher metallicity stars are more centrally concentrated than stars with lower abundances. This is due to the fact that the most massive satellites contributing to the stellar halo are also more metal rich, and dynamical friction drags them closer to the inner regions of the host halo.

We have performed a study of 3.3 micron PAH emission in planetary nebulae using ground-based observations with FLITECAM, one of a suite of instruments designed for airborne astronomy aboard SOFIA, NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. The survey was performed on the Shane 3 meter telescope at Lick Observatory as part of the ground-based commissioning of the FLITECAM grism spectroscopy mode. Spectral resolution of R ~ 1700 was obtained with direct-ruled KRS-5 grisms. Targets included AGB stars and sources showing PAH emission in KAO, ISO or IRAS observations. Additionally, several oxygen-rich nebulae were observed in order to test methodology. Twenty objects were surveyed, of which 11 showed PAH emission. In objects exhibiting PAH emission, the relationship between the nebular C/O ratio and PAH equivalent width was found, showing a detectable PAH emission cutoff at a nebular C/O ratio of 0.65 ± 0.28. Selected objects with detected PAH emission were further investigated to trace PAH emission spectral variation within individual nebulae.

We discuss the role of mass loss for the evolution of the most massive stars, highlighting the role of the predicted bi-stability jump that might be relevant for the evolution of rotational velocities during or just after the main sequence. This mechanism is also proposed as an explanation for the mass-loss variations seen in the winds from Luminous Blue Variables (LBVs). These might be relevant for the quasi-sinusoidal modulations seen in a number of recent transitional supernovae (SNe), as well as for the double-throughed absorption profile recently discovered in the Hα line of SN 2005gj. Finally, we discuss the role of metallicity via the Z-dependent character of their winds, during both the initial and final (Wolf-Rayet) phases of evolution, with implications for the angular momentum evolution of the progenitor stars of long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs).

This three-year period has seen considerable activity in the Commission, with a wide range of applications of radial velocities as well as a significant push toward higher precision. The latter has been driven in large part by the exciting research on extrasolar planets. This field is now on the verge of detecting Earth-mass bodies around nearby stars, as demonstrated by recent work summarized below, and radial velocities continue to play a central role.