Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2014

35 COSMOLOGY JULY-AUGUST 2014 The vision we have of the large cosmic struc- tures corresponds to a still image that only al- lows us to suppose what kind of transformations we must have gone through to arrive at cer- tain situations. A new simulation of the uni- verse now offers the possibility to virtually investigate with extra- ordinary spatial resolu- tion every moment of its existence. ulation of O ur knowledge of the universe is mainly based on the images of it that telescopes provide us and on the mathematical models that interpret its formation and evolution, including also the two predominant components invisible to telescopes – that is, dark mat- ter and dark energy. Although we do not know the nature of these latter compo- nents, we know at least that dark matter interacts gravitationally with ordinary matter (also called baryonic) and for this reason it has often been taken into ac- count in computer simulations, started with the aim of recreating the observable structures and verify the theoretical pre- dictions. Thanks to those simulations, it