An asteroid has been named after Miep Gies, the woman who saved the diary of Anne Frank.

The International Astronomical Union announced that asteroid Miepgies orbits between Mars and Jupiter and has an estimated diameter of seven kilometres.

Miep Gies, now aged 100, helped hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis during the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War. After the occupants of the secret Amsterdam canal house annex had been betrayed and arrested, it was she who found and hid Anne’s diary. The annex and adjacent museum now attracts nearly a million visitors a year from all over the world.

There is already an asteroid named after Anne Frank herself. The NASA spacecraft Stardust made a close flyby of it in 2002.

Around 218,000 asteroids are named after famous people. Other Dutch people with an asteroid to their name are writer Hella Haasse and Nobel Prize winner Gerard ’t Hooft.