TSSFL TECHNOLOGY STACK

Below is a snapshot of events that took place during the first South Africa-China bilateral conference, entitled “Cosmology with large surveys” held between 19th to 24th November, 2016, in Durban, South Africa at Umhlanga Rocks, Protea Hotel. The conference brought together numerous relevant astronomers and cosmologists, especially in the field of large-scale structure of the Universe, radio and optical astronomy to discuss science, new technological trends, and prospective collaborations. Substantial number of participants were from South Africa and China, and some from elsewhere around the globe. Several space scientists, telescope experimentalists and engineers from China and South Africa also attended.

Scientific topics covered during the conference included:

• Large-Scale structure of the Universe
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and Dark Energy
• 21cm, First structure formation, Epoch of Reionizatoin
• Galaxy formation and evolution
• Computational Astrophysics
• Fast Radio Burst
• Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, early Universe
• Dark Matter detection
• Dynamics of Galaxies
• Active Galactic Nuclei, Black hole accretion
• Galactic Centre and Local Group dynamics
• Big Data Challenge for Astrophysics
• Gravitational Waves and the radio/optical follow-up

The conference was ignited by a number of introductory inspirational speeches and presentations, the most notable was by Dr. Yin-Zhe Ma from University of Kwazulu-Natal. There were very intriguing aspects of empirical and experimental science presentations, amongst them included "Commensal Survey Plan by FAST" by the Lead Technologist and Engineer of Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), a Chinese mega-science project to build the largest single dish radio telescope in the world Dr. Di Li, "SKA and MeerKAT" by Prof. Bernie Fanaroff, "MeerKAT as SKA Precursor" by Prof. Justin Jonas, "Two Space High Energy Astrophysics Missions of China" by Prof. Shuang-nan Zhang, who is a Chief Scientist at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of High Energy; watch one of his interviews:



"Supermassive Black Holes Across Cosmic Time" by Luis Ho, "Beyond the Standard Lore" by Prof. Sergio Colafrancesco, "Probing the Universe with Weak Gravitational Lensing" by Zuhui Fan, "Biases in Cosmological Distance Measurements" by Pierre Fleury, "Exploring Point Spread Function" by Guoliang Li and "The Tianlai Experiment and 21-cm Cosmology" by Xuelei Chen.

These series of photos exhibit (not in order of occurrence please) events that took place during the conference, they ranged from real conference business to tour trips and having fun!

And this is how it began:

Amazing!