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Abstract
Research over the past 25 years has led to the view that the rich tapestry of present-day
cosmic structure arose during the first instants of creation, where weak ripples were
imposed on the otherwise uniform and rapidly expanding primordial soup. Over 14 billion
years of evolution, these ripples have been amplified to enormous proportions by gravitational
forces, producing ever-growing concentrations of dark matter in which ordinary gases
cool, condense and fragment to make galaxies. This process can be faithfully mimicked
in large computer simulations, and tested by observations that probe the history of
the Universe starting from just 400,000 years after the Big Bang.