Nobel winner Malala gets her own asteroid

She survived an assassination attempt and won a Nobel Prize. Now, 17-year-old activist Malala Yousafzai has an asteroid named after her.

Asteroid “316201 Malala” was named after Yousafzai, said Don Yeomans, a member of the International Astronomical Union Committee on Small Bodies Nomenclature.

Discovered in 2010, the asteroid is located in the Main Belt between Mars and Jupiter. Orbiting the sun every five-and-a-half years, it is about 4 kilometres in diameter. Its surface is very dark, the colour of printer toner.

Amy Mainzer, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, who discovered the asteroid, wrote on the Malala Fund blog that she decided to name the asteroid for Malala after her postdoctoral student Carrie Nugent brought to her attention that “few have been named in honour of the contributions of women and particularly women of colour.”

“Carrie and I read about Malala’s amazing story and thought that if anyone deserves to have an asteroid named after them, she does,” Mainzer wrote.

Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside children’s rights activist Kailash Satyarthi of India in December 2014, making her the youngest person to receive the award.