Panoramas of the Evolving Cosmos

Subaru hosted its 1st international conference at Hayama, Japan in Dec 2007 with the title "Panoramic Views of Galaxy Formation and Evolution", in which we showcased and discussed the great achievements of modern wide-field studies of galaxies across cosmic time to which Subaru had been making significant contributions with its unique wide-field instruments such as Suprime-Cam mounted on the prime focus of the Subaru telescope.

The recent advent of the new prime focus camera Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) in 2013, which now offers a 7 times wider field of view (1.77deg^2) than Suprime-Cam, has revolutionized the survey power and is now performing unprecedentedly large deep and wide legacy surveys of the panoramic, evolving cosmos. The gigantic prime focus spectrograph PFS, with ~2400 fibers over a comparable FoV is also under construction, with operations expected to start in 2019.

A number of other wide-field missions are also coming on line, such as DES, VIPERS, LSST, WFIRST, EUCLID, as well as NIR--MIR missions. We are entering into a new era in which the high-z Universe can be as extensively explored as is the nearby Universe, and the closest galaxies in the local Universe can be fully mapped.

With such exciting facilities in hand and a promising future ahead of us, it is an appropriate time for us to meet together to present and discuss new science results in various areas of galaxy evolution, including some initial results from HSC. We will also discuss the future directions of wide-field studies of galaxies and cosmology in 2020s.