Abstract

The neighborhood in the immediate cosmological vicinity of our Milky Way is known as the Near-Field. Due to its proximity to us, it is the best-observed region of the Universe. As such it is the most interesting to study, to understand and to try and simulate, as there is a wealth of observational information available that could allow us to significantly advance our knowledge on e.g. large-scale structure and galaxy formation, feedback processes and the nature of dark matter in a range of different local environments. I will present the work we have been doing over the years to address this problem. This has been largely based on constrained simulations of the Near-Field from the CLUES project, which use our ever expanding knowledge of the local structures and their velocity fields to create numerical structure formation simulations that faithfully reproduce the local universe at present. The main focus of our work has been on understanding the potentially detectable local signatures of Cosmic Reionization, for example on the number and properties of satellites of the Local Group and locations where some of the First Stars may be located (cosmic archaeology), which I will both discuss.