A Filipino in outer space

Between the planets Mars and Jupiter, there is an asteroid orbiting around the sun that bears the name of a Filipino scientist. The International Astronomical Society has named it the Badillo Asteroid, in honor of Father Victor L. Badillo S.J. of the Manila Observatory.

Father Badillo is the latest of many Jesuits whose names have been given to some celestial body or other phenomenon. There are 35 craters of the moon that bear the name of Jesuit scientists.

One of the larger ones (225 kilometers in diameter) is named after Father Christopher Clavius (1537-1612) the architect of the Gregorian reform of the calendar. One of his students was Father Matteo Ricci, apostle of China, who introduced Western science to the East.

Another lunar crater is named after Father Angelo Secchi (1818-1878) director of the Observatory of the Roman College, the founder of the meteorological service of Italy and the inventor of the Secchi meteorograph. It was under Secchi that Father Federico Faura of the Manila Observatory studied astronomy. Father Secchi was a pioneer in using spectroscopy in solar and stellar studies.

The largest of the lunar craters (410 kilometers in diameter) is named after Father Francesco Ma. Grimelli (1618-1668) a pioneer in the study of the nature and properties of light.

Father Badillo tells me that there is a joke that hell is located on the moon. That is because there is a lunar crater named after Father Maximillian Hell, director of the Vienna Observatory, well known for his observations of Venus and the Sun made in the Arctic.

If things in outer space are named after Jesuits, there are also things on earth named after them. There is a layer in the earth’s interior that is called the Repetti Layer of Discontinuity. It is named after its discoverer, Father William Repetti, who headed the seismological section of the Manila Observatory until 1942 when the Japanese confiscated the Observatory and ousted the Jesuits.

There is also a genus of plants named camellia, including the famous camellia flower and the equally famous camellia tea. The great botanist Linnaeus gave that name in honor of a laybrother in Manila, Brother Georg Kamel (hispanisized Jorge Camel), a pharmacist who was infirmarian of the Jesuit college of Manila. His articles on Philippine herbs were published by the Royal Society in London. Bro. Kamel discovered the medicinal properties of a plant that he named Strychnos Ignatei, from which the pharmacists of a later day would extract strychnine.

But if Father Badillo is not the only Jesuit to be honored by having a celestial body named after him, as far as we know, he is the only Filipino so honored.

The Badillo Asteroid is too small to be called a planet, but its size is quite large, some 30 kilometers in diameter. And it is perpetually orbiting around the sun.

Father Badillo obtained his doctorate in physics from St. Louis University in Missouri. Besides working in the Manila Observatory, he has taught physics at the Ateneo de Manila and has lectured on astronomy at the University of the Philippines and at San Carlos Seminary, Makati.