Across billions of years and billions of stars, Amina Helmi has learned to read the galaxy the way a historian reads ruins — not for what remains, but for what the wreckage reveals. The Argentine-born astronomer, working from the University of Groningen, has won the Kavli Prize for demonstrating that the Milky Way was not assembled gently but forged through ancient collisions, including a catastrophic merger with a dwarf galaxy some 10 billion years ago. Her work, made possible by the Gaia space mission's mapping of 1.5 billion stars, has rewritten the origin story of our cosmic home — and rem