Amina Helmi becomes first Argentine to receive Kavli Prize in Astrophysics

Argentine-born astronomer Amina Helmi has become the first Argentine recipient of the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, one of the field’s leading international honors. She shares the 2026 prize with Vasily Belokurov of the University of Cambridge and Rodrigo Ibata of the University of Strasbourg.

The award recognizes research that transformed scientists’ understanding of how the Milky Way was assembled. By analyzing the movements and chemical signatures of stars, Helmi identified stellar streams left by smaller galaxies absorbed billions of years ago. Her 1999 discovery of nearby stars moving unlike the Milky Way’s disk provided an early clear trace of an ancient galactic merger. Later work using data from the European Gaia mission helped uncover Gaia-Enceladus, the remnant of a major collision roughly 8 to 11 billion years ago.

Together, the three laureates showed that the seemingly settled galaxy around us carries evidence of repeated cosmic collisions. Their approach turns present-day stars into an archaeological record of galactic history and can also inform research into the distribution of dark matter.

Helmi was born in Bahía Blanca and studied astronomy at the National University of La Plata. She is now a professor and researcher at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The Kavli Prize, sometimes informally compared with a Nobel in astrophysics, was presented in Oslo.