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EChO is a dedicated mission to investigate exoplanetary atmospheres. When extracting the planetary signal, one has to take care of the variability of the hosting star, which introduces spectral distortion that can be mistaken as planetary…

Multiwavelength studies of the seven identified X-ray dim isolated neutron stars (XDINSs) offer a unique opportunity to investigate their surface thermal and magnetic structure and the matter-radiation interaction in presence of strong…

Transit-spectroscopy of exoplanets is one of the key observational techniques to characterize the extrasolar planet and its atmosphere. The observational challenges of these measurements require dedicated instrumentation and only the space…

A generic feature of weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter models is the emission of photons over a broad energy band resulting from the stable yields of dark matter pair annihilation. Inverse Compton scattering off cosmic…

Currently, the analysis of transmission spectra is the most successful technique to probe the chemical composition of exoplanet atmospheres. But the accuracy of these measurements is constrained by observational limitations and the…

Located within 10 degrees of the North Pole, northern Ellesmere Island offers continuous darkness in the winter months. This capability can greatly enhance the detection efficiency of planetary transit surveys and other time domain…

Despite about a decade of observations, very little is known about the optical and infrared (IR) emission properties of the Soft Gamma-ray Repeaters (SGRs) and of the Anomalous X-ray Pulsars (AXPs), the magnetar candidates, and about the…

The success of the SWIFT/BAT and INTEGRAL missions has definitely opened a new window for follow-up and deep study of the transient gamma-ray sky. This now appears as the access key to important progresses in the area of cosmological…

The discovery of deep spectral features in the X-ray spectrum of 1E1207.4-5209 focussed the attention of the astronomical community on this radio-quiet NS, making it the most intensively observed INS ever. The harvest of X-ray photons,…

We describe an initiative to build and use the Dark Energy Spectrometer (DESpec), a wide-field spectroscopic survey instrument for the Blanco 4 meter telescope at Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. A new system with…

Magnetars are the most luminous compact objects in the stellar mass range observed in the Milky Way, with giant flares of hard X-ray power ~10^45 erg/sec being detected from three soft gamma repeaters in the Galactic neighborhood.…

Recent Spitzer infrared (IR) observations of two transiting hot Jupiters during their secondary eclipses have provided the first direct detection of planets orbiting other stars (Charbonneau et al. 2005; Deming et al. 2005). We here…

Exoplanet transit events are attractive targets for the ultrahigh-resolution capabilities afforded by optical interferometers. The intersection of two developments in astronomy enable direct imaging of exoplanet transits: first,…

We present visibility measurements of the nearby Mira-like star R Doradus taken over a wide range of wavelengths (650-990 nm). The observations were made using MAPPIT (Masked APerture-Plane Interference Telescope), an interferometer…

[abridged] Our knowledge of the inner structure of embedded massive young stellar objects is still quite limited. We attempt here to overcome the spatial resolution limitations of conventional thermal infrared imaging. We employed…

A medium resolution 1.0-2.5um spectrum of the brown dwarf, Gliese 229B has been obtained using CGS4 on UKIRT. In addition to the broad spectral structure seen in earlier low resolution observations, the new spectrum reveals a large number…

Space telescopes such as EChO (Exoplanet Characterisation Observatory) and JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) will be important for the future study of extrasolar planet atmospheres. Both of these missions are capable of performing high…

The Visible and Near Infrared (VNIR) is one of the modules of EChO, the Exoplanets Characterization Observatory proposed to ESA for an M-class mission. EChO is aimed to observe planets while transiting by their suns. Then the instrument had…

Nighttime zenith sky spectral brightness in the 3.3 to 20 micron wavelength region is reported for an observatory site nearby Eureka, on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic. Measurements derive from an automated Fourier-transform…

Within the blazar population, hard X-ray selected objects are of particular interest as they tend to lie at each end of the blazar sequence. In particular, flat spectrum radio quasars located at high redshifts display the most powerful…