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On May 1 they were fulfilled 90 years that the now dwarf planet Pluto received its own name. This remote body of the solar system, which in 2006 lost its consideration as a planet and was flown over in 2015 by the New Horizons mission of the POT, had been discovered on February 18, 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh from the Lovell Observatory.
His discovery made headlines around the world. Lowell Observatory, which had the right to name the new object, received more than 1,000 suggestions ranging from Atlas to Zymal. The name Pluto – of the Roman god of the underworld – was proposed by the British Venetia Burney, an 11 year old girl interested in classical mythology, during a conversation with her grandfather Falconer Madan, member of the Bodleian Library. He passed the name on to astronomer Herbert Hall Turner who, in turn, sent a cable to his American colleagues with the proposal.
To choose the final name of the object, each member of the Lowell Observatory was asked to vote for one of three proposals: Minerva, which was already the name of an asteroid; Chronos, who had a bad reputation for having been proposed by the unpopular astronomer Thomas Jefferson Jackson See; and Pluto. The latter finally received all the votes. The name was announced on May 1, 1930 and, upon knowing it, Madan gave Venetia a five pound reward.
The name was soon found in popular culture. There are theories that, in 1930, Walt Disney apparently was inspired by him to call Pluto his cartoon dog – named after Pluto – Mickey Mouse’s canine companion, although Disney animator Ben Sharpsteen was unable to confirm the veracity of this. In 1941, Glenn T. Seaborg called a new chemical element inspired by the name of the planet Plutonium. The chemist followed the tradition of naming the elements discovered by the name of the new planets in the solar system. Thus, uranium was named after Uranus and Neptune’s neptunium.
Why is Pluto not a planet?
In 2003 Eris was discovered, a major star in proportions to Pluto. The International Astronomical Union, not wanting to reconfigure the system by Eris, decided to name this type of planet as in years. Despite this, a part of the community considers that Pluto has climates, surface and atmosphere, typical of planets. For these scientists, the only argument for its declassification as a planet is that it is too far from the sun.
With information from Europa Press
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