Neutron Star Astronomy in the era of the European Extremely Large Telescope

About 25 isolated neutron stars (INSs) are now detected in the optical domain, mainly thanks to the HST and to VLT-class telescopes. The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will yield ~100 new identifications, many of which from the follow-up of SKA, IXO, and Fermi observations. Moreover, the E-ELT will allow to carry out, on a much larger sample, INS observations which still challenge VLT-class telescopes, enabling studies on the structure and composition of the NS interior, of its atmosphere and magnetosphere, as well as to search for debris discs. In this contribution, I outline future perspectives for NS optical astronomy with the E-ELT.Comment: 4 pages, to be published in Proceedings of the Conference "ASTROphysics of Neutron Stars 2010", a conference in honor of M. Ali Alpar, held in Cesme (Izmir) August 2-6 201

Killing symmetries of generalized Minkowski spaces. 3-Space-time translations in four dimensions

In this paper, we continue the study of the Killing symmetries of a N-dimensional generalized Minkowski space, i.e. a space endowed with a (in general non-diagonal) metric tensor, whose coefficients do depend on a set of non-metrical coodinates. We discuss here the translations in such spaces, by confining ourselves (without loss of generality) to the four-dimensional case. In particular, the results obtained are specialized to the case of a ''deformed'' Minkowski space $\widetilde{M_{4}}$ (i.e. a pseudoeuclidean space with metric coefficients depending on energy).Comment: 31 pages. Slightly improved version with respect to the published one (some misprints corrected, Ref.s added, Eq.s revised, comments made