High Schooler Discovered Three Galaxies That Break the Rules

Astronomy has a new rulebreaker, and it was spotted by a teenager. Julian Shapiro, now a first-year astrophysics student at UC Berkeley, discovered three galaxies sitting alone in deep space that have completely stopped forming stars — a pairing so rare that cosmologists have hunted for real-world examples for years. The Three Galaxies That Break the Rules are cataloged as Shapiro Dwarf Galaxies I, II, and III, and the paper announcing them appeared in The Astrophysical Journal in October 2026, according to UC Berkeley.

The reason the discovery matters is simple: it should not happen. Small dwarf galaxies drifting in empty regions of the universe usually keep the cold gas they need to keep building stars. The ones that have gone quiet — “quenched,” in astronomers’ language — are almost always found huddled near a much larger host galaxy, where gravitational and hydrodynamic forces have siphoned off their gas. Shapiro’s trio is both isolated and quenched, which is exactly what the reigning cosmological model says a “backsplash” galaxy should look like: a galaxy that once dove close to a giant neighbor, got its star-forming gas violently stripped away, and was then flung back out into the void. The Three Galaxies That Break the Rules fit that description almost perfectly.

Why These Three Galaxies That Break the Rules Matter

Researchers at MIT and the University of California, Riverside had already run the simulations: isolated-but-dead dwarf galaxies, the models suggested, were probably cast out of galaxy clusters on boomerang-like “backsplash” orbits, as reported by SlashGear back in 2021. The standard cosmological model even predicts such galaxies should be common — but actually catching one in the nearby universe had proved elusive until now, making the Three Galaxies That Break the Rules the most convincing local candidates yet.

Shapiro’s prime suspect for the culprit is Messier 101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, a spiral sitting roughly 22 million light-years from Earth. He argues the three dwarfs once plunged through its gravitational well, where environmental forces tore away their gas before ejecting them. They are faint — their total starlight runs from about minus 7.3 to minus 8.1 in absolute magnitude — and compact, spanning only a few hundred light-years across. Ultraviolet and hydrogen-alpha observations turned up nothing for the first galaxy, confirming it has not formed stars in a long time, according to the study’s arXiv listing.

The paper is careful not to oversell the case. Shapiro Dwarf Galaxy II lies close enough to the spiral galaxy NGC 5585 that it might be a faint satellite instead of a backsplash galaxy, and the distances are still provisional. Even if one of the Three Galaxies That Break the Rules turns out to be a mere satellite, the remaining candidates would still stand — but definitive confirmation will need sharper measurements from Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, or the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which Shapiro expects will uncover many more candidates like his.

A High School Project That Outran the Professionals

What makes the story land is how it happened. Shapiro did not need a flagship telescope — he mined public archives: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Japan’s Hyper Suprime-Cam legacy images, and Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope data, then ran simulations to predict where backsplash dwarfs should be hiding near galaxies like our own. The longest part of the work, he said, was estimating distances to prove the galaxies were truly isolated. Open-access journals filled the gaps in his training, and he calls public archival telescope data “a critical tool for new discoveries,” according to UC Berkeley.

The awards followed quickly. He won the Astronomical League’s National Young Astronomer Award in 2025 and was named a 2026 Davidson Fellow for discovering the Three Galaxies That Break the Rules. Celebrated Berkeley astronomy professor Alex Filippenko praised the work as “remarkably sophisticated research,” noting how unusual it is for a high school student to produce it. Now in his first semester at Berkeley, Shapiro has joined Filippenko’s research group to work on the Hubble tension — the stubborn disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding — while hoping for follow-up observations of his three galaxies.

For anyone who has ever assumed big science belongs only to big institutions, the takeaway is direct: the same free sky surveys that professionals use are open to everyone, and a teenager just used them to hand cosmology its most convincing backsplash candidates yet. Whether the Vera Rubin Observatory confirms all Three Galaxies That Break the Rules, Shapiro’s find shows how much of the nearby universe is still waiting to be found — one careful search at a time. Keep watching the science desk for more, and for stranger things happening in deep space, see the microblazar firing a black-hole jet at Earth.