Meet the astronomer using ‘cosmic fossils’ to investigate the Milky Way's violent birth

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". "We can measure, for example, the amount of chemicals in the stars," Helmi said. "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." Read moreNASA says new space telescope will create 'atlas of the universe' 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 informati...