LONDON: Malala Yousafzai, the youngest person to win a Nobel Peace prize, now has an asteroid named after her.
According to Dawn Online, asteroid 316201 has been named after her. It was done by Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The asteroid lies in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter and was discovered by Mainzer which gives her the right to name it. The formal name of the asteroid is 2010 ML48 or 316201 Malala.
She said that, “It is a great honour 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 honour the contributions of women (and particularly women of colour).”
Born in 1997 in Pakistan, Malala became an activist for women’s education rights as a child. She delivered a speech titled “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?” in Peshawar in 2008.
In 2009 she started blogging for BBC about how it is to live with the Taliban presence and their threats. She did not reveal her identity and wrote under the name Gul Makai. However, her identity was made public by the year end, and in 2011 Malala was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize and won the Pakistan National Youth Peace Prize.
The Taliban, reacting to this, issued a warrant of death threat against Malala. On October 9, 2012 a Taliban gunman shot her in the head while she was going back to home from school. This incident resulted in Malala getting support from all over the world, and she also gave a speech at the United Nations in 2013. She has written an autobiography, ‘I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban’ as well. Yousafzai also received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European parliament in October 2013.
