A catalogue is presented with variable (RR Lyrae, semiregular and Mira) stars located inside field #3 of the Palomar-Groningen Survey, at the outer edge of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. One of the semiregular variables is a carbon star, comparable with those found by Azzopardi et al. (1991). Serendipity provides the suggestion, that their carbon stars might not be located inside, but behind the bulge in the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy.

White dwarfs that accrete the debris of tidally disrupted asteroids provide the opportunity to measure the bulk composition of the building blocks, or fragments, of exoplanets. This technique has established a diversity in compositions comparable to what is observed in the solar system, suggesting that the formation of rocky planets is a generic process. Whereas the relative abundances of lithophile and siderophile elements within the planetary debris can be used to investigate whether exoplanets undergo differentiation, the composition studies carried out so far lack unambiguous tracers of planetary crusts. Here we report the detection of lithium in the atmospheres of four cool (<5,000 K) and old (cooling ages 5-10 Gyr) metal-polluted white dwarfs, where one also displays photospheric potassium. The relative abundances of these two elements with respect to sodium and calcium strongly suggest that all four white dwarfs have accreted fragments of planetary crusts. We detect an infrared excess in one of the systems, indicating that accretion from a circumstellar debris disk is on-going. The main-sequence progenitor mass of this star was $4.8\pm0.2 M_\odot$, demonstrating that rocky, differentiated planets may form around short-lived B-type stars.

We present a candidate for the most distant galaxy known to date with a photometric redshift z = 10.7 +0.6 / -0.4 (95% confidence limits; with z < 9.5 galaxies of known types ruled out at 7.2-sigma). This J-dropout Lyman Break Galaxy, named MACS0647-JD, was discovered as part of the Cluster Lensing and Supernova survey with Hubble (CLASH). We observe three magnified images of this galaxy due to strong gravitational lensing by the galaxy cluster MACSJ0647.7+7015 at z = 0.591. The images are magnified by factors of ~8, 7, and 2, with the brighter two observed at ~26th magnitude AB (~0.15 uJy) in the WFC3/IR F160W filter (~1.4 - 1.7 um) where they are detected at >~ 12-sigma. All three images are also confidently detected at >~ 6-sigma in F140W (~1.2 - 1.6 um), dropping out of detection from 15 lower wavelength HST filters (~0.2 - 1.4 um), and lacking bright detections in Spitzer/IRAC 3.6um and 4.5um imaging (~3.2 - 5.0 um). We rule out a broad range of possible lower redshift interlopers, including some previously published as high redshift candidates. Our high redshift conclusion is more conservative than if we had neglected a Bayesian photometric redshift prior. Given CLASH observations of 17 high mass clusters to date, our discoveries of MACS0647-JD at z ~ 10.8 and MACS1149-JD1 at z ~ 9.6 are consistent with a lensed luminosity function extrapolated from lower redshifts. This would suggest that low luminosity galaxies could have reionized the universe. However given the significant uncertainties based on only two galaxies, we cannot yet rule out the sharp drop off in number counts at z >~ 10 suggested by field searches.