Abstract

Antarctica offers a unique astronomical site, especially for time-domain astronomy. The continuous dark nights during the long austral winter, together with the cold weather, excellent seeing conditions and extremely low water vapor, enable new frontiers in time-domain astronomy to be explored. In this colloquium, Dr. Wang will show recent progresses in astronomical site surveys of Dome A, Antarctica – the highest point on the Antarctica plateau. He will present results of an on-going exoplanet transit survey from Dome A, Antarctica. The extreme observing conditions make Dome A, Antarctica a unique site for wide field near-IR observations. Such observations have the potential of discovering large number of supernovae out to redshifts beyond 6. Dr. Wang will show results from recent supernova surveys using DECam and Subaru that aim at discovering supernovae beyond redshift 2, and the prospects of studying supernovae out to the epoch of reionization using future facilities such as JWST and WFIRST. He will show also how a wide field NIR survey from Antarctica with the Kunlun Dark Universe Survey Telescope (KDUST), can play a critical role in these future developments.