Meet Julian Shapiro, the New York student who found 3 unusual dwarf galaxies and won $25,000

For most people, a distant galaxy is just another faint smudge in the night sky. For Julian Shapiro, three such smudges became something much more interesting: possible evidence that some small galaxies can be stripped of their star-forming gas, pushed away from a larger galaxy and left isolated in space.

Shapiro, an 18-year-old from New York, discovered three nearby dwarf galaxies that appear to be both isolated and “quenched” — meaning they are no longer forming young stars. His research, titled “Discovery of Isolated, Quenched, and Likely Backsplash Dwarf Galaxies near M101,” earned him a $25,000 Davidson Fellows Scholarship in 2026.