In the spring of 1930, astronomers at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona had done something no one had managed in the century since the discovery of Neptune: they had found a new planet, far out past the edge of the known solar system, a faint dot tracked down by a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh. The discovery was announced in March, and the world had a question. What should the new world be called?
The answer came, as it turns out, from a schoolgirl at breakfast.
Venetia Burney was eleven years old, living in Oxford, England. On the morning of March 14, 1930, she was at the table with her maternal grandfather, Falconer Madan, who had recently retired as the librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He was reading aloud from The Times about the discovery of the still-unnamed planet. Venetia, whose great-uncle Henry Madan had once named the moons of Mars, had a head for mythology and for the solar system, and she offered a suggestion.
The planet was dark and cold and very far from the sun — the underworld of the heavens. So she proposed the name of the Roman god of that underworld: Pluto.
Her grandfather liked it. He passed the idea to a friend of his, Herbert Hall Turner, a professor of astronomy at Oxford, who was impressed enough to send it along by telegraph to the Lowell Observatory. There, the suggestion was weighed against others and, on May 1, 1930, formally adopted. The new planet was Pluto. As a reward, Madan gave his granddaughter a five-pound note.
The name had a double life that she could not have known. Pluto, of course, is the Roman god of the dead. But the first two letters, P and L, are also the initials of Percival Lowell, the astronomer whose observatory and lifelong hunt for a "Planet X" had led to the discovery in the first place. Whether that pleasing coincidence helped the name win, nobody can say for certain. What is certain is that it stuck for seventy-six years.
The choice was not automatic. The Lowell Observatory was flooded with suggestions — well over a thousand of them, arriving from around the world. Some proposed the names of other gods: Minerva, Cronus, Atlas. There was also pressure to name the new planet after Percival Lowell himself, the man whose observatory and whose long, expensive hunt had made the discovery possible. In the end, the name that carried the day was simple and elegant: a mythological name whose first two letters happened to honor the man who had spent his fortune and his last years searching for it. The astronomers voted, and it was unanimous.
Venetia Burney grew up and away from the spotlight of that one morning. She trained as a teacher, later worked as an accountant, and married a man named Maxwell Phair. For most of her life she was known, if at all, as the person who, as a child, had named a planet. When Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, she is reported to have taken the demotion with good humor. There is no record that she ever saw her planet through a telescope; it is a famously faint and distant world, and she had named it from a newspaper rather than a night sky. She died on April 30, 2009, at the age of ninety.
But the name went further than she did. When NASA's New Horizons craft finally reached Pluto in 2015, after a voyage of nearly a decade, it carried a student-built instrument — a dust counter — that had been renamed to honor her: the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter. A crater on the surface of Pluto is named Burney Basin. And the tiny world she had christened from a breakfast table became the first one in its class to be visited by anything built on Earth.
It is a strange and human story. The scientists found a world, but a child named it, and the name held. For all the instruments and calculations that go into a discovery, sometimes what stays longest is the smallest thing: a word that a girl at breakfast thought of, handed up the ladder until it reached the sky.
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