The Brazilian discovers 25 asteroids, one of which is rare and may be on its way

medical student, Verena Bakula Menezes, 22, loves to spend her time between microscopes and telescopes. While the former helps her become a neurosurgeon, the telescope showed that Medicine Void. In that time, 25 asteroids have been discovered and one of them is classified as rare by a differentiated orbit that may be toward Earth.

Throughout her life, she attended the Technical Nursing course in high school, at Unicamp between 2015 and 2017. At this moment, she was in contact with the hospital environment and after that, actually graduating, she started inConducting research in the field of pediatric computational neuroscience on the autism spectrum at Albert Einstein Hospital (SP).

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“Science has always been present in my life. I don’t even remember when I was interested. I joked that I was born a scientist because, for me, doing science and being a scientist is asking questions and asking the scientist and keeping track of the answers yourself, not being content with the superficial. I’ve always lived that way,” said the medical student. At university: “I’ve always been a very curious kid to discover the world” University of Sao Paulo (USP).

In 2019, she represented Brazil at the United Nations Youth Assembly (UN) and also moved to Canada, where he began his undergraduate studies in Neuroscience. Also, Verena found herself in a new hobby: astronomy.

“I really liked it. After training, I started using software They use it to search for asteroids. I received pictures taken through a telescope in Hawaii. Each package of images captured by the telescope consists of four images taken within seconds. I would like to take this photo bundle and throw it into the program that flashes it over and over in order. Because there is a time difference, you can tell if something is moving in space,” he said.

Once Verena finds something moving, she performs a digital analysis of the object to see if it fits the asteroid’s patterns. If the result is positive, he issued a report and sent it to the international center studying this in Harvard (USA) and in the process discovered 25 new asteroids.

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Most of the time, asteroids in the solar system are located between Mars and Jupiter, a place called the main belt. One of the asteroids discovered by Verena followed a different orbit, which increases the likelihood that its path will coincide with that of planet Earth.

“Now we have to see where it’s going, in order to predict the possible effects on Earth. I don’t know if this will happen. The possibility exists, but if we look at the dimensions of the universe, we see that the probability is very small,” he commented. In fact, a situation similar to the one told in the movie “Don’t Look For”, where the researcher discovers a comet on its way towards Earth.

source: Brazil Agency

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