Comprising the most massive gravitationally bound and relaxed structures in the Universe, galaxy clusters are essential in providing a deeper understanding of the properties of dark matter. Being cosmologically young ...

Cosmology has recently entered an era of increasingly rich observational data sets, all being in agreement with a cosmological standard model that features only a small number of free parameters. One of the most powerful ...

Following from the theory of General Relativity, light-bundles are deflected and differentially distorted while passing through the gravitational potential of matter inhomogeneities. The gravitational lensing effect caused ...

Galaxies were formed from primordial baryonic matter within the gravitational potential of the dark matter. Today a confusing wealth of different galaxy populations is known. Explaining the emergence of this zoo of galaxy ...

One of the main problems in cosmology is to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and large-scale structure. Whereas the basics of the current Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm for structure ...

Systematic surveys of the extra-galactic sky have revealed the existence of large-scale structures in the Universe: the galaxy distribution is organized in a complex network of filaments surrounding underdense regions and ...