Astrophysics
The DENIS $IJK$ survey of the entire southern sky is beginning observations this year. It will return one million images, representing 4 Terabytes, among which nearly $10^8$ stars and up to one million galaxies. The main extragalactic…
High-resolution NIR and optical images are used to constrain a dynamical model of the circumnuclear star forming (SF) region in the barred galaxy M100 (=NGC 4321). Subarcsecond resolution allowed us to distinguish important morphological…
Colours of spiral galaxies generally are affected by the underlying old stellar population, younger stars, and extinction by dust. Old and young populations generally can be disentangled using a combination of blue and near-infrared…
For many years broadband colours have been used to obtain insight into the contents of galaxies, in particular to estimate stellar and dust content. Broadband colours are easy to obtain for large samples of objects, making them ideal for…
The AIRES (AIR-shower Extended Simulations) system is a set of programs and subroutines to realistically simulate particle showers produced after the incidence of high energy cosmic rays on the Earth's atmosphere, and to manage all the…
In general, synthesis models provide the mean value of the distribution of possible integrated luminosities, this distribution (and not only its mean value) being the actual description of the integrated luminosity. Therefore, to obtain the…
We derive and solve exactly the Dyer-Roeder equation in a Friedman-Robertson-Walker cosmological model with non zero cosmological constant. To take into account non homogeneous distribution of matter we use the phenomenological clumpiness…
This book provides a completely new approach to understanding the universe. The main idea is that the principal objects in the universe form a spectrum unified by the presence of a massive or hypermassive black hole. These objects are…
Understanding diffuse Galactic radio emission is interesting both in its own right and for minimizing foreground contamination of cosmological measurements. Cosmic Microwave Background experiments have focused on frequencies > 10 GHz,…
This paper presents new images and spectroscopy of NGC 34 (Mrk 938) obtained with the du Pont 2.5-m and Baade 6.5-m telescopes at Las Campanas, plus photometry of an HST archival V image. This Mv = -21.6 galaxy has often been classified as…
Traditionally, the distance to NGC 4038/39 has been derived from the systemic recession velocity, yielding about 20 Mpc for H_0 = 72 km/s/Mpc. Recently, this widely adopted distance has been challenged based on photometry of the presumed…
VLA maps of ammonia emission were made for the Galactic Center region. The NH3(1,1) and NH3(2,2) transitions were observed in three 2' x 2' fields covering Sgr A* and the region 3' immediately south of it. In the central 3 parsecs…
We present a summary of the major contributions to the Special Session on Data Management held at the IAU General Assembly in Prague in 2006. While recent years have seen enormous improvements in access to astronomical data, and the Virtual…
I have used the Hipparcos Input Catalog, together with Kurucz model stellar atmospheres, and information on the strength of the interstellar extinction, to create a model of the expected intensity and spectral distribution of the local…
Recent X-ray observations have shown broad, skewed iron line emission from Seyfert 1 galaxies which is explained by the emission being fluorescence on a disk close to a black hole. During one interval, the line in MCG--6-30-15 was so broad…
The EFAR project is a study of 736 candidate elliptical galaxies in 84 clusters lying in two regions towards Hercules-Corona Borealis and Perseus-Pisces-Cetus at distances cz = 6000-15000 km/s. In this paper (the first of a series) we…
Recently, it was suggested that large concentrations or groups of quasars may trace sites of enhanced matter density at medium and high redshifts analogous to how galaxy clusters trace them in nearby space. We have checked existing quasar…
Extinction due to intergalactic grey dust has been proposed as an alternative to accelerated expansion to account for the dimming of \s fluxes beyond $z \simeq 0.5$. The ``replenishing'' grey dust model, although fitting the observational…
Current astrophysical research suggests that the most persistently luminous objects in the Universe are powered by the flow of matter through accretion disks onto black holes. Accretion disk systems are observed to emit copious radiation…
We present results of our wide-field redshift survey of galaxies in a 285 square degree region of the Shapley Supercluster (SSC), based on a set of 10529 velocity measurements (including 1201 new ones) on 8632 galaxies obtained from various…