| Abstract: | The galaxies within a few hundred kpc of the Milky Way contain a wealth of information regarding the history of the Local Group. For one the satellites of the Milky Way and our closest neighbor Andromeda are anisotropically distributed in the sky, a finding that is hard to explain within the current paradigm of Cold Dark Matter. In this talk I will present the pressing problems related to satellites and the environment from where they originated, along with some ideas of how such a peculiar set-up could have originated. I will highlight recent work which seeks to characterize the larger scale structure of the universe (known as the cosmic web) in terms of the velocity field, and discuss the influence of the meso (quasi-linear) scales on the shapes and angular momenta of dark matter haloes that form within it. |
