Modern physics is perhaps at the beginning of a new era. The combination of experiments and observations with a renewal of the basic principles of physics (concerning, e.g., gravitation, quantum physics and their overlapping), provide a very active field of research, with the hope of answering some of the most complex and profound questions.
Among the several questions to which science has to find an answer, one of the most important concerns the energetic content of the Universe. The exact knowledge of what the Universe is made of, and in which amounts, would allow not only to determine its age, its past and future evolution, but also to address from a scientific point of view the question about its finiteness or its final end. The equivalence between the energetic content and the space-time properties of the Universe lead cosmologists to make some of the most mysterious discoveries in the history of modern science: the existence of dark matter and dark energy. 

This book gives a broad synthesis and guideline for those issues and questions.  It will be of great interest for experimental and theoretical physicists as well for students in master of physics.