Universita' degli Studi di Torino
Dipartimento di Fisica Generale "Amedeo Avogadro"
Via Pietro Giuria 1 I-10125 Italy
Visible matter in the Universe concentrates in well separated islands - the galaxies. Galaxies are not distributed uniformly in space, but they rather show a complex network of sheets, filaments and regions almost devoided of galaxies. The formation of galaxies depends on physical processes which occur on very different scales: from the scale of stars to that of clusters of galaxies. By combining models of the large scale structure formation in the Universe and models of the main processes driving the formation of galaxies, we are able to investigate, at the same time, the large scale distribution of galaxies and their internal properties. The properties of a large region of the Universe modelled this way are remarkably similar to those of the observable Universe. This approach has substantially improved our current understanding of the galaxy formation processes and provides a powerful tool to constrain cosmogonic theories.