Khagol_113_January 2018

| KHAG L | No. 113 - JANUARY 2018 | 03 other observable exotic effects. There were many shorter and contributed talks on aspects of CMB science, large structure studies and the understanding of t he early universe. Local large structure observations leading to exciting new discovery of a massive supercluster was presented by Somak Raychaudhury (IUCAA). The meeting featured Roy Maartens (University of Portsmouth) on the promise of 21cm cosmology with the Square Kilometre Array under construction. Renan Barkana (Tel Aviv) reviewed the theoretical promise of 21cm cosmology as a probe of the first stars in the universe. Chris Messenger (Cardiff University) talked about the promise of the new born gravitational wave astronomy for cosmology. There were also talks on the status of inflation by L. Sriramkumar (IIT Madras), with some string theory motivated aspects covered by Koushik Dutta (SINP, Kolkata). Bharat Ratra (Kansas State University) and Paul Steinhardt (Princeton University) (remote presentation) provided balance to the meeting by putting forward in very thought provoking talks on shortcomings and alternate points in the majoritarian view of current status of cosmology. The path of the future missions is promising, but extremely challenging, and hence requires sophisticated scientific tools, data analysis techniques, and theoretical understanding to reach the next landmark of our understanding of the Universe. There were a number of shorter talks on various aspects of the same. The meeting lived to its promise of covering a broad range of very contemporary topics at the forefront of current cosmology. It also featured a panel discussion on the future of CMB related studies and efforts that could be taken in that direction. The workshop was co- organised by Suvodip Mukherjee (Centre for Computational Astrophysics, New York) and Tarun Souradeep and Sanjit Mitra (IUCAA).