Scientific Rationale

The latest edition of the workshop “Unsolved Problems in Astrophysics and Cosmology" will take place between the 2nd and the 6th of July, 2018 in Budapest, Hungary on the new campus of Eotvos University by the Danube river. We wish to promote strong interdisciplinary interactions in this relaxing setting.

The rationale of the workshop is to bring together leading scientists in those fields of Astrophysics and Cosmology that hold the promise of answering the most fundamental questions about the Universe. The workshop will be very interactive, and will center around discussions led by a handful of leaders in their area of expertise. We kept organizing this meeting regularly, to provide a forum to chart the path to progress. The highly successful inaugural edition took place in 2011 in Benasque and we had excellent feedback from the participants at that meeting about collaborations, ideas and papers that originated during that meeting.

The workshop will also coincide with (the round of 16 games during) the 2018 FIFA world cup and we will provide facilities and schedule the talks to allow viewing the corresponding matches. The meeting will follow the informal and highly interactive and successful workshops we have held during the last four world cups (in Daejong, Korea in 2002, and in Budapest in 2006, 2010 and 2014).

We have invited eleven plenary speakers (discussion leaders) to the meeting. In addition we invited a number of other leading researchers to reach a quorum of about 50 people. Following an overview of the unsolved problems in each research theme, led by the plenary speaker(s), we will have 5-7 shorter, specialized talks by other experts in each topic, in order to kick-start a longer follow-up discussion.

 Topics with discussion leaders:

Monday - What has been solved since 2014? Rocky Kolb
Monday - Exoplanets: Catherine Espaillat and Zhaohuan Zhu
Monday - Astrophysical Black Holes: Cole Miller

Tuesday - Gravitational Wave Astronomy: Selma de Mink 
Tuesday - Time Domain Astronomy: Maria Drout

Thursday - Dark Energy and Large Scale Structure: Istvan Szapudi
Thursday - Cosmology and Early Universe: Albert Stebbins

Friday - Galaxy Formation: Richard Ellis
Friday - Closing Remarks: Zoltan Haiman