Meet the astronomer digging for Milky Way ‘fossils’
Astronomer Amina Helmi is recognized for her pioneering work in galactic archaeology, using star data to reconstruct the Milky Way's history. Her research, bolstered by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, identified a major ancient collision with a dwarf galaxy that shaped our galaxy's structure.
Why it matters
Understanding the formation and history of the Milky Way provides critical insights into the evolution of galaxies and the origins of our solar system.
Alongside family photos and piled-up dissertations with impenetrable titles sits a bowl stacked with the chocolates named after the star system she has spent her career studying.Digging into the Milky Way's violent past has earned this 55-year-old astronomer, originally from Argentina, the Kavli Prize, widely seen as the Nobel Prize of astrophysics.Helmi is a world expert in a field known as galactic archaeology, which aims to decipher what has happened to our galaxy in the past and get a glimpse of its future by using stars as "cosmic fossils"."We can measure, for example, the amount of chemicals in the stars," Helmi told AFP in an interview."This works as a kind of DNA of a star in the sense that they preserve information of where they were born and in which environment."Forget the typical image of an astronomer with eyes glued to a telescope scanning the celestial sphere.Helmi fixes her eyes…
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