Amina Helmi shares Kavli Prize for Milky Way research

Amina Helmi, an astronomer at the University of Groningen, has won a share of the Kavli Prize for research using stars as evidence of the Milky Way's violent past.

Helmi, originally from Argentina, is a leading researcher in galactic archaeology, a field that studies stars as “cosmic fossils” to understand how galaxies formed and changed.

She shares the prize with Vasily Belokurov of the University of Cambridge and Rodrigo Ibata of the University of Strasbourg. The award includes a share of a $1 million prize fund, a medal and a citation due to be presented in September in Oslo by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Helmi's work used data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which measured the motions of about 1.5 billion stars and helped researchers reconstruct the Milky Way's history.

Her team found evidence that around 10 billion years ago a dwarf galaxy, Gaia-Enceladus, collided and fused with the early Milky Way. Helmi said the collision helped create a “puffed up” disk that is now a feature of the galaxy.

The prize citation praised the three scientists for “uncovering the fossil evidence of past mergers proving that the Milky Way galaxy was built through hierarchical accretion.”

Helmi told AFP she was “totally speechless” when she learned she would receive the award, calling it major recognition for a relatively young field.