How a precocious 11-year-old girl gave Pluto its name

New Horizons reaches Pluto

Venetia Phair was an English 11 in 1930 when she named Pluto. The 2008 documentary explores the planets naming and documents Phair as she sees Pluto for the first time through a telescope, 77 years after naming it. (Courtesy of Father Films)

The morning of March 14, 1930, was a fairly ordinary one in the Oxford home of 11-year-old Venetia Burney. The schoolgirl was eating breakfast in the dining room while her grandfather, Falconer Madan, paged throughthatdays edition of the Times of London.

But fate lay on page 14: astoryabout a newly discovered planet found at the far reaches of the solar system.

Madan read the story aloud to his precocious granddaughter, whohad studied the planets in school byarranginglumps of clay in the university park to model the distances between celestial objects. Young Venetia also had a penchant for classical mythology (all the major celestial objects in our solar system are named for Greek and Roman gods), so when Madan speculated about the new planets name, she had a suggestion up her sleeve.

We all wondered, she recalled in the documentary Naming Pluto. And then I said, Why not call it Pluto? And the whole thing stemmed from that.

Venetiasgrandfather, the retired head of the historic Bodleian Library at Oxford University, passed the idea along to an astronomer friend of his, who responded, I think PLUTO excellent!! according to the New York Times. (Theres nothing like a new planet to get dignified British professors to use excessive punctuation and all-caps.)

The astronomer telegraphed his colleagues at the Arizona observatory that discovered the new planet, and they voted unanimously in favor of the name. Pluto, the solar systems ninth planet, was born.

We all know what happened 75 years later: New astronomy discoveries and a debate about the true definition of a planet resulted in Pluto being stripped of its title.

Pluto may no longer be a planet. It may be small and obscure. Butit is the ultimate underdog, capable ofcaptivating us with its hapless charm despite distance and darkness and years of scientists slowly chipping away atits status. And its champions, like 11-year-old Venetia, come from the unlikeliest of places. They include a scientificoutcast and a penniless farm boy, along with the thousands of ordinary astronomy lovers who cheered when NASAsNew Horizons spacecraft whizzed pastTuesday morning,sending backthe best image yet of everyones favorite planet-that-isnt.

There it was, all rocky brown and beige. And in its lower hemisphere was an almost-perfect heart. How could ours not melt?

[After a wait, spacecraft confirms that it survived its close pass of Pluto]

It was a long way from the very first photograph of Pluto, taken by Percival Lowell almost exactly 100 years earlier. Lowell was a turn-of-the-century American astronomer infamous for speculating that aliens had built canals on Mars.

Somewhat outcastfrom the space community for his admittedly zany notion, Lowell dedicated the remainder of his life to yet another thankless task: the search for Planet X, anelusive rocky body at the very outer reaches of our solar system. Using a primitive camera and borrowed telescope, he spent more than a decade diligently photographing the night sky, hoping to findevidence of a planet whose existence had been theorized since the 1840s but never proved.

In the spring of 1915, Lowells camerafinally caught what it had been searching for: two faint images of a small sphereof space rock more than 3 billion miles from the Sun. But for reasons we many never know maybe Lowell never saw the images, maybe he did and didnt recognize their significance Lowell never realizedthat hed finally found the ninth planet.Lowell died a year later, and those first photographs faded into obscurity.

Lowellsdeath in 1916 left a gap in the ninth planetsearch effort, one that remained mostly empty until 1929, when a 23-year-old namedClyde Tombaugh arrived at the Flagstaff, Ariz.,observatory Lowell founded.

Annette and Alden Tombaugh, the children of Clyde Tombaugh, remember their father and his discovery of Pluto. (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)

Tombaugh was the son of farmersfrom Kansas, and his dreams of going to college were dashed when a hailstorm destroyed his familys crops, according to a biographyon the Academy of Achievement Web site. Undaunted, he taught himself trigonometry and geometry and began building his own telescopes. The sketches of planets he drew with his homemade equipment were so impressive that, when he sent them to the observatoryin Flagstaff, astronomers there invited him to come work for them.

I was rather unnerved by it all, everybody were strangers, 1,000 miles from home, and not enough money in my wallet for a return ticket home,Tombaugh wrote of his first day there, according to the Kansas Historical Society.

Upon his arrivalTombaugh was put to work on Lowells old task searching for the elusive trans-Neptunian object. Though the technology was slightly better, the technique for seeking out a distant planet hadnt changed much.Tombaugh spent hours in an unheated dome, snapping photos of the sky, then examined the exposuresto determine whether any of the pinpricks of lightin them seemed to move over the course of days. Objects thatremained stationary were stars, the logic went. But if it moved it might be a planet.

After nearly a year of searching, he found it a tiny speck that crept across several of his photos. Thats it! he recalledexclaiming. Tombaugh and his colleagues spent more than a week studying the moving speck and confirming its validity, then announced their finding to the world on March 13, 1930. It would have beenLowells 75th birthday.

The discovery transformedTombaugh froman anonymous researcher into an international astronomy sensation. He was offered a scholarship to the University of Kansas, became a military researcher and astronomy professor, and is credited with discovering several new asteroids and hundreds of stars. An ounce of hisashes, saved after he died in 1997, wason board New Horizonswhen it launched in 2006.

[For children of Plutos discoverer, New Horizons is a personal triumph]

Thousands of miles across the Atlantic, the news of the discovery reached young Venetia Burney. She thought that Pluto, the Roman G*d of the underworld, was a fitting namesake for the darkest and most distant planet.The Lowell astronomers seemed to agree they voted unanimously in favor of the name, which had the added bonus of beginning with the same letters as Percival Lowells initials.

When the news went public, according to a 2006 interview with theBBC, Burneys grandfather rewarded her with a five-pound note.

In the interview, Burney is modest about her stroke of genius she came up with Pluto mostly because the other major names from classical mythology had already been taken, she said. But she is indignant on one point: She did not name the planet for Pluto the dog, a Disney character thatdebuted in the same year.

It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way round. So, one is vindicated, she said.

Burney, who became Venetia Phair after she was married, went on to become a schoolteacher and minor astronomy celebrity an asteroid has been named for her, as hasa dust-measuring instrumenton board New Horizons. She died in 2009, three years after the spacecraft launched and six years beforeit would reach the planet she named.

NASA"s New Horizons mission plans to collect more information on the planetary identity of Pluto. (NASA)

[Why the July 14 Pluto flyby will be a spectacular event for all of us]

Itsimprobable christening by a British schoolgirl was in some ways the highpoint for Pluto.After spending nearly a century trying to find the elusive planet, astronomers spent most of the next 85 years challenging its significance. Estimates of Plutos size wererepeatedly revised downward throughout the 20th century. The discovery of its largest moon, Charon, in the 1970s, allowed them to nail down the planets massatjust a tiny fraction of Earths.

In the 1990s, astronomers began identifying other large, rocky objects in Plutos general neighborhood, which we now know asthe Kuiper Belt. Scientists began debating whether Pluto ought to be reclassified from ninth planet to king of the Kuiper Belt in the words of Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson, who in 2000 left Pluto out of the New York museumsplanetary display.

The death knell for Pluto as a planet came in 2005, when astronomers discovered the space object Eris even farther from the sun than Pluto and seemingly even larger. Appropriately named for the Greek goddess of chaos and strife, Eris sparked an uproaramong astronomers. Either scientists had found a 10thplanet, or they had to reconsider what the term planet really meant.

The International Astronomical Union went with the latter option, deciding in 2006 to classify both Pluto and Eris as dwarf planets. The rationale was that Pluto wasnt massive enough to clear the neighborhood around its orbit (meaning that there are no other objects of comparable sizein its orbit except those that are under its gravitational influence, such as satellites).

It was crushing news for the average Pluto enthusiast. But many of the people who study Pluto say that the affable, unflappable, not-quite-planet is no worse off for its redesignation.

Pluto is the granddaddy of the most populated region in the solar system, with the most to tell us about our history, Hal Levison, a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute who advocated for revising the planet classification criteria, told Slate last year. It must not mind.

The demotionmay even haveworked in its favor.

Its interesting, isnt it, that as they come to demote Pluto, so the interest in it seems to have grown?Venetia Burney commented tothe BBCin 2006.

After all, everyone loves an underdog.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/15/how-a-precocious-11-year-old-girl-gave-pluto-its-name/