Overview
- The Kavli Prize in Astrophysics was awarded jointly to Amina Helmi, Vasily Belokurov and Rodrigo Ibata for finding fossil stellar evidence that the Milky Way assembled through past galactic mergers; the winners received the honor at ceremonies in Oslo this week.
- Helmi’s research combines stellar motions, ages and chemical abundances in a method called chemodynamics to separate stars born in the Milky Way from those accreted from other galaxies.
- A major result credited in the award is the identification of debris from a large ancient merger known as Gaia‑Enceladus, a collision roughly 8–11 billion years ago that helped build the Galaxy’s halo and altered its early disk.
- Born in Bahía Blanca and trained at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Helmi built a career in Europe and now works at the Kapteyn Institute in Groningen, and colleagues say the prize recognizes decades of collaborative analysis of large surveys led by ESA’s Gaia mission.
- The Kavli Prize carries a substantial monetary award and wide prestige for fields without a Nobel prize, and the committee said the work will drive further studies of galaxy formation and the dark matter distribution that shapes them.