Get the latest news and updates from Dawn
GRONINGEN: Amina Helmi’s passion for the Milky Way is clear as soon as one steps into her small office at the University of Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands.
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”.
