Astrophysics

Fast Radio Bursts are mysterious radio flashes that appear to have extragalactic origin. The inferred isotropic brightness temperature for these events can exceed 10^34 K. Discovered in 2006, only about 25 have been reported to date. I will give a short summary of the these events then explain how a new generation of dense radio arrays will dramatically improve our understanding of these burst. The HIRAX telescope in South Africa will detect about 10 FRBs per day and will localize these events with sub-arcsecond precision. A next generation of packed array could detect one every minute, allowing tomography of the ionized universe.

Gravitational lensing is one of the primary investigation tools of all current and future wide field surveys. In this talk I will review its current status (with the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS)) and show what unique cosmological information it gives us. Lensing is not limited to a, low redshift, dark universe probe, it can also be used as a tool to probe baryons and nicely work in synergy with baryonic probes (e.g. CMB, Xray, tSZ, HI). I will show some of the work in progress to help constraining Active Galactic Nuclei feedback