Genus Salsola, a genus of annual semi-dwarf to dwarf shrubs and woody tree species, is widely distributed across the arid and semi-arid areas of the world. Several features like high fodder value, abundant seed production, tolerance to extreme climatic conditions like high temperature and prolonged drought conditions contributed significantly towards its success as a potential forage species in...

Dwarf galaxies (DGs) are more numerous than large galaxies. Most dwarfs in clusters are dEs, but in the field they belong mostly to late types. The importance of late-type DGs in the context of the intergalactic medium (IGM) lies in the fact that (at least some) are probably " young " galaxies forming stars for the first time. Many DGs have significant amounts of interstellar gas, they may form...

We compare chemical abundances of Local Group dwarf spheroidals, obtained from recent UVES/VLT observations, and of high redshift Damped Lyman α systems (DLAs), corrected for dust effects. We focus, in particular, on the abundance ratio between αcapture elements and iron, α/Fe, a well known indicator of chemical evolution. Comparison of the data in the plane α/Fe versus Fe/H shows a remarkable ...

Early-type dwarfs dominate cluster environments, yet their formation and evolutionary histories remain unclear. The ALFALFA (Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA) blind survey is providing a census of HI in galaxies of all types in a range of environments. Here we report on ALFALFA results for Virgo Cluster earlytype dwarfs between declinations of 4 and 16 degrees. Less than 2% of the Virgo early-type dwar...

Model atmospheres have been computed for M dwarfs that are strongly irradiated by nearby hot companions. A variety of primary and secondary spectral types are explored in addition to models specific to four known systems: GD 245, NN Ser, AA Dor, and UU Sge. This work demonstrates that a dramatic temperature inversion is possible on at least one hemisphere of an irradiated M dwarf and the emerge...

We present an analysis of low-resolution infrared spectra for 25 brown dwarf candidates in the NGC 1333 molecular cloud. Candidates were chosen on the basis of their association with the high column density cloud core, and near-infrared fluxes and colors. We compare the depths of water vapor absorption bands in our candidate objects with a grid of dwarf, subgiant, and giant standards to determi...

We have measured the angular diameters of six M dwarfs with the CHARA Array, a long-baseline optical interferometer located at Mount Wilson Observatory. Spectral types range from M1.0 V to M3.0 V and linear radii from 0.38 to 0.69 R ⊙. These results are consistent with the seven other M-dwarf radii measurements from optical interferometry and with those for sixteen stars in eclipsing binary sys...