This May 1 marks 90 years since 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 NASA’s New Horizons mission, had been discovered on February 18, 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh from the Lovell Observatory.
The discovery made headlines around the world. The 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 his grandfather Falconer Madan, a 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 object’s final name, each member of the Lowell Observatory was asked to vote for one of three proposals: Minerva, who was already the name of an asteroid; Cronos, 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 learning it, Madan gave Venetia a five-pound reward.
The name was soon found in popular culture. According to Wikipedia, in 1930 Walt Disney was apparently inspired by him to call his cartoon dog Pluto _ which is 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 named a new chemical element inspired by the name of the planet, plutonium. Seaborg followed the tradition of naming the discovered elements by the name of the new planets in the solar system. Thus, uranium was named after Uranus and Neptune’s neptunium.
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