The influence of post-Newtonian effects in the rotation of Earth on UT1 are investigated and found to be negligible.

Atmospheric parameters and Li abundances have been determined for 162 stars observed at high resolution, high signal to noise ratio with the ELODIE echelle spectrograph (OHP, France). Among them, about 70 stars are active stars with a large fraction of BY Dra type stars. For all stars, rotational velocities were obtained with a calibration of the cross-correlation function, effective temperatures by the line depth ratio method, surface gravities by the parallaxe method and by the ionization balance of iron. The frequency of stars with observed lithium is significantly higher in active stars than in non active stars. Among active stars, no clear correlation has been found between different indicators of activity for our sample stars, but some correlation of an index R′H K and vsini is observed.

Early-type galaxies (ETGs) satisfy a now classic scaling relation Re ∝ σ1.2eI−0.8e, the Fundamental Plane (FP; Djorgovski & Davis 1987; Dressler et al. 1987), between their size, stellar velocity dispersion and mean surface brightness. A significant effort has been devoted in the past twenty years to try to understand why the coefficients of the relation are not the ones predicted by the virial theorem Re ∝ σ2eI−1e.

We present new maps of the distribution of both dust and stars across the Galactic disk, based largely on an improved analysis of 2MASS and Spitzer-IRAC data. The infrared extinction law is rederived throughout the disk and we found strong longitudinal variations in both diffuse and dense environments that we incorporate in our analysis.

Stellar rotation at young ages: new results from Corot's Angular momentum is one of the driving forces in the early evolution of stars. Issues such as the coupling between the star and the accretion disk (the so-called disk regulation paradigm), are traced by the evolution of rotational momentum, but affect the star-forming process as a whole. One of the features observed in star-forming regions (e.g. ONC and NGC 2264) of age between 1 and few Myr, for masses above 0.25 solar masses, is a bimodality of the rotational period distribution, with a peak around 1 day and the other at around 4 to 7 days. This bimodality has been interpreted as the smoking gun of the disk-locking mechanism (with the fast rotators having lost their disk and the slow ones still being regulated by their disks).

Observations of light elements in hot massive stars are limited to few transitions of boron in the satellite-ultraviolet; lithium and beryllium are not observable at all. But because of its high sensitivity to the effects of rotational mixing, boron abundance determinations in massive stars have excelled as the definite test for evolutionary models with rotation. In this paper the observational evidence for rotational mixing in massive stars is reviewed and alternative interpretations are discussed.

Historically, low luminosity stars have attracted very little attention, in part because they are difficult to see except with large telescopes, however, by neglecting to study them we are leaving out the vast majority of stars in the Universe. Low mass stars evolve very slowly, it takes them trillions of years to burn their hydrogen, after which, they just turn into a He white dwarf, without ever going through the red giant phase. This lack of observable evolution partly explains the lack of interest in them. The search for the “missing mass” in the galactic plane turned things around and during the 60s and 70s the search for large M/L objects placed M-dwarfs and cool WDs among objects of astrophysical interest. New fields of astronomical research, like BDs and exoplanets appeared as spin-offs from efforts to find the “missing mass”. The search for halo white dwarfs, believed to be responsible for the observed microlensing events, is pursued by several groups. The progress in these last few years has been tremendous, here I present highlights some of the great successes in the field and point to some of the still unsolved issues.

Diffuse intracluster light (ICL) has now been observed in nearby and in intermediate redshift clusters. Individual intracluster stars have been detected in the Virgo and Coma clusters and the first color-magnitude diagram and velocity measurements have been obtained. Recent studies show that the ICL contains of the order of 10% and perhaps up to 30% of the stellar mass in the cluster, but in the cores of some dense and rich clusters like Coma, the local ICL fraction can be high as 40%-50%. What can we learn from the ICL about the formation of galaxy clusters and the evolution of cluster galaxies? How and when did the ICL form? What is the connection to the central brightest cluster galaxy? Cosmological N-body and hydrodynamical simulations are beginning to make predictions for the kinematics and origin of the ICL. The ICL traces the evolution of baryonic substructures in dense environments and can thus be used to constrain some aspects of cosmological simulations that are most uncertain, such as the modeling of star formation and the mass distribution of the baryonic component in galaxies.

We present the results of experiments performed in the Padua simulators of planetary environments, named LISA, used to study the limits of bacterial life on the planet Mars. The survival of Bacillus strains for some hours in Martian environment is briefly discussed.

We use about 1400 red giant branch stars observed in 19 Galactic Globular Clusters (GCs) to compare colours, metallicities, and RGB bump luminosities of stars assigned to first and second generations. We find subtle differences which we attribute to the different He content. In general these differences are visible only when we consider the extreme second generation stars, with the exception of NGC 2808. When using various indicators, the implied helium enhancements are similar, but the absolute calibration is still uncertain.

The first digital astronomical surveys emphasised exploration of the sky away from the crowded Galactic Plane. But now, increased computing power has made it possible to take on comprehensive surveying of the Galactic Plane even at high spatial resolution and down to faint magnitude limits. A number of ambitious wide-area surveys sampling high energies, optical wavelengths, the infrared, sub-millimetre and radio ranges are complete, in process, or about to begin. The goals of these surveys are as broad as Galactic science itself, but are mainly focused either on solving key problems in star formation and stellar evolution, or on mapping the complex substructures of the Galactic bulge and disk in order to see more clearly how the whole is constructed. This meeting brought together researchers directly involved in the many surveys, along with specialists in the observations and modelling of the ISM, stellar evolution, and the structure of the Galactic Disk and Bulge.

It is well known that the interstellar (ISM) and intergalactic (ICM) media are threaded by large scale magnetic fields. The understanding of its role on the dynamics of the media is, however, still in progress. For the ISM, magnetic fields may control or, at least, play a major role on the turbulence cascade leading to the star formation process. The ICM, on the other hand, is assumed to be thermally dominated but still the magnetic field may play an important role on the processes of acceleration and propagation of cosmic rays. In this work we provide a review of the latest theoretical results on the evolution of MHD turbulence under collisional and collisionless plasma approaches.

PLATO is a 6 tonne completely self-contained robotic observatory that provides its own heat, electricity, and satellite communications. It was deployed to Dome A in Antarctica in January 2008 by the Chinese expedition team, and is now in its second year of operation. PLATO is operating four 14.5cm optical telescopes with 1k × 1k CCDs, a wide-field sky camera with a 2k × 2k CCD and Sloan g, r, i filters, a fibre-fed spectrograph to measure the UV to near-IR sky spectrum, a 0.2m terahertz telescope, two sonic radars giving 1m resolution data on the boundary layer to a height of 180m, a 15m tower, meteorological sensors, and 8 web cameras. Beginning in 2010/11 PLATO will be upgraded to support a Multi Aperture Scintillation Sensor and three AST3 0.5m schmidt telescopes, with 10k × 10 CCDs and 100TB/annum data requirements.

The effects of shellular rotation on the modelling of solar-type stars (in particular internal structure, evolutionary tracks in the HR diagram, lifetimes and surface abundances) are first examined. Then the effects of a dynamo possibly occuring in the internal stellar radiative zone by imposing nearly solid body rotation are studied. These results are finally discussed in the context of the rotational history of exoplanet host stars and the link between lithium depletion and the presence of exoplanets.

Hot subdwarf stars (of the sdB and sdO type) host three known classes of nonradial pulsators. Two of them feature short period (P ~ 60 - 600 s) accoustic mode oscillations, while the third group is characterized by slow g-mode deformations with periods of ~ 1 - 2h. These pulsations offer favorable grounds to infer some of the internal properties of these objects through asteroseismology. This has been exploited for the rapid p-mode sdB pulsators and the present contribution reviews some of the recent advances in this field. The long period g-mode pulsators, whose vibrations probe much deeper inside the star, are also of high interest. With the advent of space observations using CoRoT and KEPLER, the asteroseismology of these slower oscillators will also become a possibility, and likely contribute to significant breakthroughs in our understanding of these hot and compact stars.

We present data from our ice mapping program IMAPE on the AKARI satellite. Initial results show a correlation between the abundance of CO2(s) and H2O(s), consistent with previous studies. We can trace abundances of molecules across a core using a single observation.

Chemical features of the local disk have firmly established the picture for the formation of the Galactic disk that the star formation has proceeded under the continuous accretion of low-metallicity gas from the halo. It sets two determinant processes for the evolution of deuterium (D), that is, the destruction of D in the interior of stars and the supply of new (nearly) primordial D associated with the gas infall. Conventional Galactic chemical evolution (GCE) models predict that this scheme leads to a monotonic decrease in D/H with time and ends up in the present-day D/H abundance (D/H)0 which is severely lower than the recently observed estimates. These predicted features are the natural results of a construction of the metal-rich (~solar abundance) local star+gas system. Here we propose that the new GCE models, that incorporate large-scale winds form the Galactic bulge which entrain heavy elements and drop them on the disk with the recent tendency of star formation in tune with the observed implications, make the system rich in both metals and D. In addition, our finding of a gradual increase in D/H with time during the last several Gyr is observationally supported by the D/H abundance for the protosolar cloud lower than (D/H)0.

According to a recent systematic study of dwarf irregular galaxies the production of their magnetic fields appears to be regulated mainly by the surface density of the galactic star-formation rate. Magnetic fields in nearby dwarfs are typically weak, with the mean value of the total field strength three times smaller than in the normal spirals. Dwarfs with stronger fields reveal vivid star-forming activity, have clear signs of current or recent gravitational interactions, are more massive and evolved systems. Recently discovered strong regular fields in an early-type ringed galaxy NGC 4736 also indicates that even without spiral density waves an effective generation of strong magnetic fields is possible in any type of galaxy if only starburst characteristics are reached.

The atmospheres of close-in Extrasolar Giant Planets (EGPs) experience important stellar radiation, raising the question of the heat redistribution around the planetary surface and of the importance of photochemistry effects for their spectral properties. They experience mass loss via quasi-thermal escape of their lightest elements. They rotate and experience tidal effects. Model atmospheres struggle to include even part of this complexity. Some address the dynamics of the atmospheres as a whole (3D) as subjected to rotation, or as patches of the surface (wind studies), compromising on the details of the composition and radiative/convective properties. Others solve the composition and radiative/convective properties, compromising on dynamical effects such as rotation. In this paper, we review existing model atmospheres for EGPs, and present the first high spatial resolution local (as opposed to global) 2/3D radiation hydrodynamic simulations of EGP atmospheres including dust cloud formation.

Simulations of the Galactic pulsar population are reviewed. These include snapshot and time-dependent models of normal pulsars as well as binary and milli-second pulsars.