In the current CDM cosmological scenario, N-body simulations provide us with a universal mass profile, and consequently a universal equilibrium circular velocity of the virialized objects, as galaxies. In this paper we obtain, by combining kinematical data of their inner regions with global observational properties, the universal rotation curve of disc galaxies and the corresponding mass distribution out to their virial radius. This curve extends the results of Paper I, concerning the inner luminous regions of Sb-Im spirals, out to the edge of the galaxy haloes.

Recently an increasing number of studies were devoted to measure the abundances of neutron-capture elements heavier than iron in stars belonging to Galactic Open Clusters (OCs). OCs span a sizeable range in metallicity (-0.6 ≤ [Fe/H] ≤ +0.4), and they show abundances of light elements similar to disk stars of the same age. A different pattern is observed for heavy elements. A large scatter is observed for Ba, with most OCs showing [Ba/Fe] and [Ba/La] overabundant with respect to the Sun. The origin of this overabundance is not clearly understood. With the goal of providing new observational insights we determined radial velocities, atmospheric parameters and chemical composition of 27 giant stars members of five OCs: Cr 110, Cr 261, NGC 2477, NGC 2506 and NGC 5822. We used high-resolution spectra obtained with the UVES spectrograph at ESO Paranal. We perform a detailed spectroscopic analysis of these stars to measure the abundance of up to 22 elements per star. We study the dependence of element abundance on metallicity and age with unprecedented detail, complementing our analysis with data culled from the literature. We confirm the trend of Ba overabundance in OCs, and show its large dispersion for clusters younger than ∼4 Gyr. Finally, the implications of our results for stellar nucleosynthesis are discussed. We show in this work that the Ba enrichment compared to other neutron-capture elements in OCs cannot be explained by the contributions from the slow neutroncapture process and the rapid neutron-capture process. Instead, we argue that this anomalous signature can be explained by assuming an additional contribution by the intermediate neutron-capture process.

We find a new Tully–Fisher‐like relation for spiral galaxies holding at different galactocentric radii. This radial Tully–Fisher relation allows us to investigate the distribution of matter in the optical regions of spiral galaxies. This relation, applied to three different samples of rotation curves of spiral galaxies, directly proves that: (i) the rotation velocity of spirals is a good measure of their gravitational potential and both the rotation curve's amplitudes and profiles are well predicted by galaxy luminosity, (ii) the existence of a dark component, less concentrated than the luminous one, and (iii) a scaling law, according to which, inside the disc optical size: Mdark/Mlum= 0.5(LB/1011 LB⊙)−0.7.

Barium is a neutron capture element, that, in open clusters, is frequently overabundant with respect to the Iron. A clear explanation for this is still missing. Additionally, its gradient across the Galactic disk is poorly constrained. We measure the abundance of yttrium and barium using the synthetic spectrum method from UVES high-resolution spectra of eight distant open clusters, namely Ruprecht 4, Ruprecht 7, Berkeley 25, Berkeley 73, Berkeley 75, NGC 6192, NGC 6404, and NGC 6583. The barium abundance was estimated using NLTE approximation. We confirm that Barium is indeed over-abundant in most clusters, especially young clusters. Finally, we investigated the trend of yttrium and barium abundances as a function of distance in the Galaxy and ages. Several scenarios for the barium over-abundance are then discussed.

We derived elemental abundances in 27 Cepheids, the great majority situated within a zone of Galactocentric distances ranging from 5 to 7 kpc. One star of our sample, SU Sct, has a Galactocentric distance of about 3 kpc, and thus falls in a poorly investigated region of the inner thin disc. Our new results, combined with data on abundances in the very central part of our Galaxy taken from literature, show that iron, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, calcium and titanium LTE abundance radial distributions, as well as NLTE distribution of oxygen reveal a plateau-like structure or even positive abundance gradient in the region extending from the Galactic center to about 5 kpc.