Cosmology: space, time & the structures in between

Humans have been looking at the sky since pre-historic times, wondering where everything comes from. Thanks to centuries of scientific and technological advancements we now know that our Universe was generated almost 14 billion years ago in an event called Big Bang, that it went through various stages of evolution in the past and that most of it is made of mysterious components: Dark Matter and Dark Energy. I will take you on a journey to the Big Bang and back in a brief history of how everything came to be, from the smallest particles to the largest structures we see today.

The everlasting search for the largest structures in the Universe have been one of the most human activities. Nowadays, astronomers observe a rich and complicated structure of galaxy clusters, filaments, and voids. Interestingly, the formation and evolution of this cosmic web is governed by unknown substances, dark matter and dark energy, that cosmologists wish to map and analyze. I will show how the underlying assumptions of these models can be challenged by careful statistical probes, and with clever new measurement techniques including the accurate mapping of our own cosmic environment.