Astrophysical windows into fundamental physics

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The last two decades have witnessed rapid progress in our phenomenological understanding of physical cosmology, to the extent that the six-parameter concordance cosmological model can accurately predict hundreds of independent observational data points (from optical to radio wavelengths), often with percent-level precisions. Nevertheless, most ingredients of the standard theoretical model of cosmology remain exotic: The energy budget of our cosmos appears to be dominated by the quantum vacuum, but mysteriously, it is lighter than the natural expectation from particle physics models, by some sixty orders of magnitude. The gravity on galactic scales appears to be dominated by dark matter, but it has evaded any direct or indirect non-gravitational detection for more than half a century since its discovery. Even most of the baryonic matter in the Universe remains invisible to us.