Rodrigo
Ibata

Rodrigo Ibata was born in Wokin in England and graduated in physics from the University of Bristol in 1989. After taking the mathematical tripos at Cambridge University, he then completed a doctorate on galactic stellar populations at the university's Institute of Astronomy. He subsequently took up a number of postdoctoral positions in Canada and Germany, before finally settling down as a researcher with the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Strasbourg in 2000.

It was during his PhD that Ibata and colleagues in Cambridge discovered that the previously unknown Sagittarius dwarf galaxy is being consumed by the Milky Way. He went on to show that Sagittarius' tidal stream wraps right around the Milky Way, and that the stream's properties strongly constrain the shape of our galaxy's dark-matter halo. He also found a "Giant Southern Stream" in the Andromeda galaxy, and, using data from the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey, ascertained that about half of Andromeda's satellite galaxies form a huge rotating plane - a finding that continues to stimulate debate about galaxy formation among astrophysicists.