Reconstructing Our Cosmic Neighborhood
The Manticore Project is building a digital twin of our Universe — a scientifically faithful, data-driven reconstruction of the cosmic structures that surround us. Using advanced Bayesian inference, we trace the observed galaxies and their motions back through time to recover the invisible dark-matter web that shaped them.
Traditional cosmological simulations begin with random starting points and produce idealized universes. Manticore takes the opposite approach: it works backwards from real observations — galaxy surveys, peculiar velocity maps, and large-scale structure data — to infer the initial conditions that could have evolved into the Universe we see today.
Each reconstruction is not a single model, but a full ensemble of possible cosmic histories, capturing the uncertainties in both observation and theory. Together, these “digital twins” reveal how dark matter, gravity, and cosmic flows sculpted our local Universe.
By directly comparing theory with observation at the level of density and velocity fields, Manticore provides one of the most stringent tests yet of the standard cosmological model (ΛCDM) and its alternatives. The framework also offers realistic environments for galaxy-formation studies, CMB cross-correlations, and survey optimization.
Open Science: All Manticore reconstructions, halo and void catalogues, and derived data products are freely available for scientific use. Researchers can explore, analyze, or build upon the most detailed map yet of the nearby cosmos.
Manticore marks a shift from simulating generic universes to reconstructing our own.
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