Post by Faculty of Science and Engineering - University of Groningen

Great new: Amina Helmi receives the prestigious Kavli Prize for Astrophysics 🎊 🏅, honouring her groundbreaking research that changed the view on how our Milky Way was formed fundamentally. She wins the prize together with Vasily Belokurov (University of Cambridge) and Rodrigo Ibata (University of Strasbourg). By analyzing the movement and features of millions of stars, she and her colleagues discovered so called stellar streams, the remains of smaller galaxies that collided with the Milky Way billions of years ago 🌌. Next to the Nobel Prize, the Kavli Prize is one of the highest honours in science. It is awarded every two years by Det Norske Videnskaps-Akademi / The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in three categories, astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience. The laureates receive one million US dollars jointly. Helmi is viewed as a pioneer in galactical archeology. One of her most influental work is discovering the Gaia-Enceladus in 2018, a major galaxy that fused with our Milky way ten billion years ago and shaped our Milky Way into the current thick disk. In 2019, Helmi received the Spinoza prize. Read more about the research Helmi and her colleagues conducted 👇 https://lnkd.in/eRhXeMTS #astronomy #astrophysics #MilkyWay #womeninSTEM #universityofgroningen 📸 : Reyer Boxem