The field of time-domain astronomy has seen significant advancements in the latest years as increasingly sensitive, deep and wide-field surveys of the sky at all wavelengths are being carried out more and more frequently. Furthermore, the addition of gravitational wave detectors around the world has opened an entirely new window...
Due to the unprecedented sensitivity of the Advanced LIGO--Virgo network, in less than ~5 years the field of gravitational-wave astrophysics has evolved from speculating about the properties of compact binary mergers to having an observed population that facilitates astrophysical inference. These observations encode information about their progenitor stellar systems ---...
Two unique structures make up the nucleus of our Galaxy on different scale sizes. On a broad scale of a few hundreds of parsecs, there is the well-known central molecular zone which comprises a substantial component of the gas in the Galaxy. The other, known as the mini-spiral, is streamers...