Composite image of the centre of the Milky Way, created by the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Nasa/JPL-Caltech/Esa via Wikimedia Commons Vasily Belokurov is one of three winners of the 2026 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. The award is for “uncovering the fossil evidence of past mergers proving that the Milky Way galaxy” was built through the continuous collision and merging of smaller objects. No matter the time or vantage point, from a pre-Neolithic cave to