The youngest ever recipient of the Nobel prize, Malala Yousafzai, now has an asteroid named after her. The asteroid, discovered by Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will now be called Asteroid Malala. The asteroid lies in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter and orbits the sun every 5.5 years.
This comes only a few days after a minor planet discovered by Kenzo Suzuki of Toyota, Japan, was officially named after Viswanathan Anand, the accomplished Indian chess player.
The Pakistan born girl became the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious Nobel Prize in n2014, at the age of 17. She shared it with Kailash Satyarthi from India. She had been nominated for the award earlier in 2011 as well but failed to win it on that occasion.
Malala became an activist for women’s right to education at a very young age. She had delivered a speech titled “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?” in Peshawar in 2008. To highlight how the women in Taliban ruled areas were facing hardships and deprived of educational amenities, she began blogging for BBC in 2009 under the alias Gul Makai. Through her writings, the people in the western world came to know how the women in Malala’s part of the world were living.
Towards the end of 2009 however, she revealed her true identity and came out in the open- defying all threats by the fundamentalist group. In 2011, she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize and won the Pakistan National Youth Peace Prize.
Taliban, irked by her publicity at their cost, issued a death warrant against her in 2012. She was infact shot in her head in October 2012 while coming home from school by Taliban activists. Her miraculous survival and the tale of grit and determination underlying it all catapulted the teenager into international fame.
Malala gave a speech at the United Nations in 2013 at the age of 15 and later even penned an autobiography, ‘I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.’
Meanwhile, Amy Mainzer, the astronomer who earned the right to name the asteroid after having discovered it, said, “It is a great honor to be able to name an asteroid after Malala. My postdoctoral fellow Dr. Carrie Nugent brought to my attention the fact that although many asteroids have been named, very few have been named to honor the contributions of women (and particularly women of color).”
