Asteroid named after Sonoma State University

The Rohnert Park campus recently got news of an out-of-this-world honor.|
ALLIE PORTER
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Sonoma County is now famous even in outer space after the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Sonoma State University got an asteroid named after it, according to the Napa Valley Register.

The asteroid, dubbed "25164 Sonomastate" was discovered in 1998 by Larry Wasserman, an astronomer at the Lowell Observatory's Near-Earth Object Search at the Anderson Mesa Station in Arizona.

The honor is in recognition of the Rohnert Park school's nationally recognized education and outreach program for space missions and STEM teacher education.

"I think it's incredibly exciting that Sonoma State's contributions to space science are being recognized by the naming," said Dr. Lynn Cominsky, professor and chair of the astronomy department at the school, after hearing the news from the International Astronomical Union.

Want to find it? Grab your telescope and point it to the main asteroid belt, just between Jupiter and Mars. It is almost two miles in size and orbits the sun every 3.6 years.

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