Photos: Mother of Iranian astronomy honored

Alenush Terian

The 90th birth anniversary of the first Iranian female astronomer and physics professor, Alenush Terian, was celebrated at the Ararat Club in Tehran.

The ceremony was attended by some Iranian MPs and over 100 Armenian people to pay tribute to Iranian mother of astrology and the establisher of the solar observatory of the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Tehran.

At the ceremony, the Tehran MP Hassan Ghafurifard made a short speech about his acquaintance with Terian who was his professor at the university. He said that she had visited her at the elderly house once.

"She always said I have a daughter who named sun and the moon is my son," he added saying that it is his honor that he is the guest of this celebration.

After that, the representative of northern Tehran Armenian inhabitants in Majlis Yureg Vartan called Terian as one of luminaries which Iranian Armenian is proud of her.

"The presence of luminaries like Terian is a witness to Armenian accompaniment with Iranians all through the history," he added.

The message of the Iranian Archbishop Sabuh Sarkisian on the occasion of Terian's birth anniversary was read out at the ceremony as well.

Born in an Armenian family in 1920 in Tehran, Alenush Terian graduated in 1947 from Tehran University Science Department and she began her career in physics laboratories of the same university and was elected as the chief of laboratory operations in the same year.

She graduated in 1856 in atmospheric physics from Sorbonne University. She came back to Iran and she became an assistant professor in thermodynamics physics at the University of Tehran.

She studied solar physics observatory for 4 months by a scholarship of German government and finally became the first female professor of physics in Iran on 1964.

In 1966 she became a member of the geophysics committee of Tehran University and in 1969 finally was elected as the chief of the solar physics studies in that university and began to work in the solar observatory which she was one of its founders. She was retired on 1979.

Happy Birthday!