the medical student, Verena Paccola Menezes, 22, likes to spend her time between microscopes and telescopes. While the former helps her become a neurosurgeon, the telescope has shown the medicine space. It was then that she detected 25 asteroids and one of them is classified as rare by the differentiated orbit that it may be in the direction of Earth.
Throughout her life, the technical nursing course was taken in high school, at Unicamp between the years 2015 and 2017. At this moment, she had contact with the hospital environment and then, already graduated, she started toconduct research in the area of computational neuroscience for children on the autistic spectrum at Hospital Albert Einstein (SP).
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“Science has always been present in my life. I don’t even remember when I got interested. I joke that I was born a scientist because, for me, doing science and being a scientist is to ask questions, question the world and go after the answers on your own, without being content with the superficial. I’ve always lived this way. I’ve always been a very curious child to discover the world,” said the medical student at University of Sao Paulo (USP).
In 2019, she represented the Brazil at the Youth Assembly at the United Nations (UN) and also moved to Canada, where he started a degree in neuroscience. Also, Verena found herself in a new hobby: astronomy.
“I really liked that. After training, I started using the software which they use to hunt for asteroids. I received images taken through a telescope in Hawaii. Each packet of images taken by the telescope was made up of four images taken within seconds. I would take that packet of images and throw it into the software that flashed them over and over in order. As they had a time difference, you could tell if something was moving in space”, he described.
As soon as Verena found something moving, she would do a numerical analysis of the object to see if it fit the patterns of an asteroid. If the result was positive, it generated a report and sent it to the international center that studies this at Harvard (USA) and in the process, it detected 25 new asteroids.
Image: Neila Rocha (ASCOM/SEAPC/MCTI)
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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 detected by Verena followed a different orbit, which increases the possibility that its path coincides with that of planet Earth.
“Now we have to see where it is going, in order to predict possible impacts with the Earth. I don’t know if that 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 Up’, in which a researcher discovers a comet with the route towards Earth.
Source: Brazil Agency
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