<\/p>\n
Vasily Belokurov is one among three winners<\/a> of the 2026 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. The award is for uncovering fossil evidence of past galactic mergers that prove how the Milky Way evolved.<\/em><\/p>\n Regardless of the time or vantage point, from a pre-Neolithic cave to a post-lockdown London high-rise, the predictability of the night sky has all the time been humanity\u2019s symbol of permanence and reassuring stability.<\/p>\n Yet this apparent calm is deceptive. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, emerged from chaos and turbulence<\/a>, and its constellations are filled with migrants, exiles and survivors. At once, it has begun to stretch and warp again<\/a>, pulled by an enormous companion and heading for an inevitable collision.<\/p>\n How can I be so sure? As a galactic archaeologist<\/a>, my job is to reconstruct the past of our galaxy and browse the signs of its future.<\/p>\n As an alternative of digging through soil, I exploit the laws of dynamics and stellar evolution to sift through a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of stars\u2014looking for essentially the most ancient and chemically peculiar amongst them, interpreting their orbits and piecing together the events that shaped the Milky Way. One ancient encounter<\/a> left scars so deep that, billions of years later, they still define the galaxy around us.<\/p>\n I need to know what governs the lives of those massive cosmic systems: which changes are nature\u2014the slow internal evolution of a galaxy disk<\/a>\u2014and that are nurture, imposed by collisions and mergers.<\/p>\n Questions on the source of dark matter<\/a> underpin all of it. That is the invisible substance whose gravity holds galaxies together, but whose true identity stays one among the best unsolved puzzles in astrophysics.<\/p>\n The Milky Way is the one galaxy where stellar motions will be measured in extraordinary detail. This enables cosmologists including myself to construct our most precise map yet of dark matter: how far it reaches<\/a>, how dense it’s across the sun<\/a>, what shape<\/a> it has, and how smooth or lumpy it could be<\/a>. If we are able to construct this map in enough detail, we may begin to know not only where dark matter is, but what it’s.<\/p>\n