The teenager who found three 'backsliding' galaxies — and proved a 25-year-old cosmic theory

UC Berkeley freshman Julian Shapiro, working from public telescope archives while still in high school, discovered three unusual dwarf galaxies near M101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, that sit alone in space yet have stopped making stars — a combination thought to be nearly impossible. His paper in the Astrophysical Journal argues they're 'backsplash' galaxies: wanderers that plunged past a giant neighbor, had their star-making gas stripped away, and were flung back into the void. It's among the first real-world evidence for a long-standing cosmological prediction — and a win for open data. Shapiro was named a 2026 Davidson Fellow and now works with Berkeley professor Alex Filippenko's group, hoping the new Vera Rubin Observatory will reveal many more backsplash galaxies like the ones he found.