By analyzing recent microscopic many-body calculations of few-nucleon systems and complex nuclei performed by different groups in terms of realistic nucleon-nucleon (NN) interactions, it is shown that NN short-range correlations (SRCs) have a universal character, in that the correlation hole that they produce in nuclei appears to be almost A-independent and similar to the correlation hole in the deuteron. The correlation hole creates high-momentum components, missing in a mean-field (MF) description and exhibiting several scaling properties and a peculiar spin-isospin structure. In particular, the momentum distribution of a pair of nucleons in spin-isospin state $(ST)=(10)$, depending upon the pair relative ($k_{rel}$) and center-of-mass (c.m.) ($K_{c.m.}$) momenta, as well as upon the angle $Theta$ between them, exhibits a remarkable property: in the region $k_{rel}gtrsim 2,fm^{-1}$ and $K_{c.m.}lesssim 1,fm^{-1} $, the relative and c.m. motions are decoupled and the two-nucleon momentum distribution factorizes into the deuteron momentum distribution and an A-dependent momentum distribution describing the c.m. motion of the pair in the medium. The impact of these and other properties of one- and two-nucleon momentum distributions on various nuclear phenomena, on ab initio calculations in terms of low-momentum interactions, as well as on ongoing experimental investigations of SRCs, are briefly commented.
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