Scientists recently named four asteroids after four Catholic religious sisters who helped catalog about 500,000 stars in the Vatican portion of the Carte du Ciel “Celestial Map” star atlas of the early 1900s.
Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi, and Luigia Panceri expected to be working as nurses when they joined the Suore di Maria Bambina community in Milan. Instead, they spent up to 11 years researching 481,215 celestial bodies for the Vatican Observatory. Their discoveries were then published in a 10-volume catalog…
