Meet the astronomer digging into the Milky Way's 'fossils'

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 on vast catalogues of data -- sometimes with two billion lines of information -- containing precious information about the stars.The European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which aimed to form a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way, was a key turning point for Helmi's research."That measured...