This is the 11th annual symposium organized by ASX. This event aims to educate the public on some aspects of cosmology, and encourage students and the public to get informed and involved in the exciting projects and discoveries in cosmology. In the past, the symposium has featured famous astronauts, numerous top researchers, and leaders in the space industry. Previously, this annual event had attracted more than 600 audience members.

We are honored to be featuring:

Professor Anthony Aguirre from University of California, Santa Cruz

During the past two decades astronomers and cosmologists have assembled an extremely successful model that accurately describes and explains the evolution of the observable universe over the past 13.8 billion years, most recently confirmed with amazing accuracy by the PLANCK satellite's observations of the cosmic microwave background. A key component of this cosmological "standard model" is the theory of Inflation, in which at ultra-early times the universe was expanding exponentially. Originally envisaged as an important but brief cosmological epoch, since Inflation's invention cosmologists have realized that in many cases inflation completely upends our picture of the ultra large-scale structure of the universe, and suggests that the universe lasts forever, may not have had a beginning, and has enormous size and complexity that is best described as a 'multiverse'. Aguirre will trace the development of these ideas, as well as look forward to prospects for testing or even confirming the idea of an infinite inflationary multiverse.

Professor Matt Dobbs from University of McGill

Mankind has been looking up at the cosmos throughout history, asking big questions such as, “what is our place in the universe, … how did it begin?” Today, astronomers and scientists have been addressing questions such as these through adventurous exploits that are yielding big answers. In this talk we’ll journey to Antarctica where the South Pole Telescope was built to answer questions about the origin, fate, and composition of the universe

Professor Rafael Lopez-Mobilia from University of Texas at San Antonio

Cosmology is by now considered a precision science. It has achieved impressive advances in both observation and theory over the last few decades, which finally provide us with good answers to the ancient questions about the origin of the universe, its age and composition, its structure and how it developed, and its likely future evolution. Still, lots of mysteries remain, such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the cosmic asymmetry between matter and antimatter, and whether the universe is finite or infinite. In this talk we will explore these mysteries and some of the proposed explanations, and also speculate about what the possible consequences might be for our understanding of the cosmos and of the fundamentals laws of physics.