Korea Institute for Advanced Study

Astrophysics Group

In the KIAS history, the Astrophysics Group is relatively young and small research group. However, we are interested in many aspects of astrophysics, particularly in theoretical and observational "cosmology".

Cosmology is the study of the evolution of our Universe. With the tremendous growth in computational and observational power, cosmology is a rapidly moving and fairly young field. Since 1980's the study of cosmology has changed radically in both the quantity and quality of data. It has became a truly quantitative science and even a field of precision measurements. Therefore, the goal of modern cosmology becomes to construct a physical model that is consistent with astronomical observation. There have been continuous efforts for this aim by observing the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters, cosmic microwave background radiation, and so on. Recently, primordial temperature anisotropy and polarization observed by WMAP satellite and large scale structures probed by 2dF and SDSS projects enable us to open a precision cosmology, which means that now we can constrain cosmological parameters within a few percent uncertainties through joint analyses of various observational data. The KIAS astrophysics group have been contributing to this great job.

Topics of our current interest include cosmic microwave background, numerical simulations of structure formation, and large-scale structure, which are summarized below.