In this talk, I will give a brief overview of modern cosmology of the last century and highlight its phenomenal successes and distinctive challenges. I will analyze why the measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation and Big-Bang Nucleosysthesis greatly improves our understanding of the hot big bang. Then I will switch to its distinctive challenges and explain what are the new observational frontiers of this  decade of cosmology, highlighting where the new physics may possibly emerge.

About the speaker:  

Professor Yin-Zhe Ma obtained his Bachelor degree in Physics from Nanjing University, a master degree from Institute of Theoretical Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences (supervisor: Prof. Rong-Gen Cai), and a PhD degree in Astronomy from University of Cambridge (supervisor: Prof. George Efstathiou FRS). He conducted CITA National Fellowship at University of British Columbia Canada and a research associate at University of Manchester, and then moved to University of KwaZulu-Natal South Africa as a faculty. He chairs the NAOC-UKZN Computational Astrophysics Centre and Chinese-South African Forum of Astronomy.

His research focusses on observational and theoretical cosmology aimed at understanding the fundamental laws of the Universe and uncovering the nature of dark energy and dark matter. He is currently a member of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) team, the Planck science team, the Hydrogen Epoch Reionization Array (HERA), CMB Stage-4 experiment and LSST (Vera C. Rubin Observatory). With Planck science team he was awarded the 2018 “Gruber Cosmology Prize” by the IAU. He has published over 100 papers, with total citation exceeded 13000, h-index 42. He also serves as an adjunct professor at both National Astronomical Observatory China and Purple Mountain Observatory China. He was awarded the NSFC Oversea Scholar grant (国家自然科学基金委海外和港澳学者基金).