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An odd story of naming a distant planet
My Turn
However, there must, sooner or later, be an exception to every rule. Such was the case with Venetia Burney.
Her story is as unlikely as the distant planet she put a name to.
According to journalist William Grimes writing in an obituary in a recent issue of The New York Times, "One morning in 1930, Venetia was having breakfast with her mother and her grandfather Falconer Madan, retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, who mentioned that scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., had photographed a planet lying beyond Neptune. Its existence had been suspected since the 19th century. Scientists working under Percival Lowell had been chasing it photographically since 1906. Now the theoretical planet was a fact."
Her grandfather wondered what it should be called, and Venetia said, "why not call it Pluto?" He liked the suggestion and passed it along to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford.
Turner was in London at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, where word of the planet had members buzzing and proposals for a name flew fast and furious.
"I think Pluto excellent," he wrote to Madan on his return. "We did not think of anything so good at our meeting. The only name that got any attention was Kronos, but that won't do alongside Saturn." Kronos is the Greek equivalent of Saturn.
"Turner immediately sent a telegram to Flagstaff: 'Naming new planet, please consider PLUTO, suggested by small girl Venetia Burney for dark and gloomy planet.'"
A spirited discussion ensued. Minerva was considered the front-runner, until it was pointed out that the name already belonged to an asteroid.
"In the end, scientists at the Lowell observatory voted unanimously for Pluto partly because the first two letters could be interpreted as homage to Perceval Lowell, and on May 25 the new planet received its official name."
Venetia later said she came up with Pluto simply because it was one of the Roman gods still available for planetary duty.
"Whether I thought of a dark gloomy Hades, I'm not sure," she said.
Pluto was an instant success. Walt Disney used it for Mickey Mouse's dog, and it provided the name for Element 94 in the Periodic Table, plutonium, first identified in 1941. In 1947, Venetia married Maxwell Phair, a classicist who became housemaster and head of English at Epsom College.
In 1987, the asteroid 6235 Burney was named in Mrs. Phair's honor, as was a dust-measuring instrument on board New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft that took off for Pluto in 2006.
Last year the Astronomical Union decreed that Pluto was not a planet at all, it was a "plutoid," any dwarf planet beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Venetia Phair died on April 30 in her home in Banstead, Surrey. She was 90.
Charlie Langdon is the Herald's senior critic. He can be reached at langdons@gobrainstorm.net.
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