Bruno Guerra Napurí
The content of this news item has been machine translated and may contain some inaccuracies with respect to the original content published in Spanish.
This week we received proud news from PUCP! The International Astronomical Union awarded Dr. Myriam Pajuelo, professor of the Academic Department of Science, Physics Section, a recognition by naming an asteroid after our professor. Among the reasons for being chosen, her career as one of the first planetary scientists in the country stands out, as well as her work as a populariser of cosmology. She joins a select group of scientists with a similar honour.
"It is a great honour and gives me great joy. I know several European, North American and Asian astronomers who have their asteroid. And well, I think it's a dream that every planetary astronomer and every astronomer in general has," confesses Pajuelo.
Asteroid (37309) Pajuelo is a body that is orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, and was discovered in 2011 at the Loneos observatory in Arizona, USA. It has not yet been studied much, but the PUCP professor believes it would be interesting to track it down, as its orbital parameters are currently known, but not its physical parameters. "It would be great to discover that it has a moon, as my doctoral work focused on binary asteroids, that is, asteroids with satellites," says Miryam Pajuelo.
He received the good news from his colleague, Dr Gonzalo Tancredi, a Uruguayan astronomer at the University of the Republic and president of Division F of the International Astronomical Union, an organisation to which Pajuelo also belongs.
Dr. Pajuelo is one of the lecturers in charge of the Cosmology course, the science that studies the universe. This is also a favourite among General Studies students, who are required to take at least one course in the natural sciences, thus making the most of the interdisciplinary nature of our University.
"In my courses, I try to make students see science - and physics in particular - as a fascinating experience that is fundamentally related to them and should not be alien to them, at least in an introductory way," he explains. On the way he teaches, he emphasises: "I really like to do experiments, although unfortunately in these times we have to limit ourselves to simulations and videos".
Professor Pajuelo shares a dream with us: that the PUCP will one day have its own observatory, so that it can take data from Peru and have an observational activity. "I also hope that at some point the conditions will be right to open an astronomy course at the University," she says.
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