Recently I wrote of Saturn, and in passing, mentioned the New Horizons voyage to Pluto, the tiny body on the outer edges of our solar system.
In doing so I felt compelled to further trace its history - and quite a charming one it is too -
Pluto, following the tradition of planets being named after old Greco - Romano gods, was named after the god of the underworld (who apparently could be invisible).
It is said that the idea of the underworld was evoked because the planet was presumed to be dark and cold, being so far from the sun - of course, ironically
hell is traditionally scorchingly hot, so maybe Mercury would have been more appropriate ?
Regardless, at the present time, Pluto is in retrograde, therefore moving backwards in the firmament, and if you follow that sort of thing, you'll know the implications.
Think '
mirror universe' or '
Bizarro world '.
But I digress -
The whole story stems from a wealthy Bostonian man named Percival Lowell, who established an
observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in the U.S.A in 1894, and set about solving the mystery of what was then referred to as 'Planet X', an object so far distant that it was all but invisible even to the strongest telescopes of the day, and whose existence could seemingly only be deduced by its effects on other planetary bodies nearby.
Sadly, though, Percival Lowell passed away before the mystery world was finally discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930.
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| Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto from photographic evidence |
The discovery was made by comparison of photographs, using a device called a '
blink comparator'- a steampunk name if ever I heard of one.
However, the newly discovered 'planet X', still needed a name.
Early suggestions included 'Percival' in memory of the late Mr Lowell, but the final name 'Pluto' was given by an eleven year old English schoolgirl called
Venetia Burney.
I include a link to an interview from 2006 between
N.A.S.A. and Venetia Burney -Phair, part of which is reproduced below.
I found this to be a great collision of two worlds (N.A.S.A. and Oxford) and Venetias selfless replies to be atypical of that old school
sang-froid:
When you look back at your life, isn’t it exciting that there you were an 11 year old school girl who named this planet, and we’ve come so far technologically that now we can send a spacecraft all this distance in the solar system to this planet Pluto?
Yes, it is absolutely amazing, but it is paralleled by almost everything that has happened in the world, hasn’t it. I mean we have stepped so far into the future as it were since the 1920’s and 1930’s. It leaves one absolutely stunned.
Do you like to look up at the stars?
Very much. Sadly it gets increasingly difficult to (do this). It’s so well lit around here that only the brightest stars really get a look-in unless we have a power outage of course. But occasionally if one is in the country, and it is a good clear night, it is absolutely wonderful.
Of course, even that snippet of the interview is weighted towards the novelty angle of an eleven year old schoolgirl naming a planet - in fairness, Venetia was the grandaughter of former librarian at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, (the wonderfully named Falconer Madan) whose brother, when Master of Science at Eton, had suggested the names Phobos and Deimos for the moons of Mars.
So there is a pedigree there, and speaking of pedigree, which we weren't -
There is the cartoon Disney dog, and for some time, much to the consternation of Venetia and others, it was alleged that the planet had been named after the dog.
In truth, the character who became known as Pluto, was originally a bloodhound called 'Rover', and was not re-christened until one year
after the rocky planetoid was named.
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Actual Selfie on camera lens of PlutoLander
"ESO-L. Calçada - Pluto (by)" by ESO/L. Calçada - Pluto (Artist’s Impression). Licensed under CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons |
"It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet rather than the other way round", Venetia told the BBC in 2006, "So, one is vindicated".
And finally, we can look forward to the first ever flypast of Pluto later this year (July 14th), when the New Horizons craft, on its seemingly endless journey (well, nine years and counting - apparently it's heading out to the Kuiper Belt , which is a whole new unexplored territory).
The New Horizons spacecraft contains the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, former midwest American farmhand who discovered the little planet all those years ago.
