P.N.ZOYTLOW

A Cosmic Footnote

On Friday, the 14th of March, in Oxford, England, eleven-year-old Venetia Katherine Burney joined her mother and grandfather for breakfast. Her grandfather, a retired librarian at Oxford University, was reading the morning paper and, as was his habit, shared news of interest with his daughter and granddaughter. That morning, they heard that the Lowell Observatory had announced the discovery of a new planet orbiting the sun and located at the solar system’s edge. “We have a ninth planet beyond Neptune; well, that’s certainly news!” said her grandfather. 

As Venetia told the story, she asked her grandfather if the new planet had a name, and it did not. Young Venetia, whose interests in school ranged from mathematics to classical mythology, knew that all the planets had the names of Greek and Roman gods except the one she lived, which was derived from Old Germanic “ertha” for “ground.” After a few minutes, Venetia suggested that astronomers should name the new planet Pluto. Young Ms.Burney had chosen well. Pluto was the God of the Underworld, and the new planet drab was likely a miserable place with a dim, frigid surface.

Venetia’s grandfather, Falconer Madan, was well connected with several astronomers, and, at his suggestion, they forwarded the name Pluto to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. There, the staff had been weighing suggestions for a name, one of which may have been Pluto, but when the telegram arrived from England with Venetia Burney’s choice, they quickly decided on it and credited her with the idea.

The young astronomer who discovered Pluto was 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh, and he was drawn to the name Pluto because the first two letters, P and L, stood for Percival Lowell, founder of the Observatory which bears his name. Lowell, who died in 1916, had long promoted the idea that there was a “Planet X” beyond Neptune, and Tombaugh was the man who found it.

Since the discovery, Pluto’s status as a planet has been questioned, and today it is regarded as a “dwarf planet” and considered a feature of the Kuiper Asteroid Belt. 

Clyde Tombaugh and Venetia Burney lived long enough to learn of Pluto’s impending official demotion to dwarf planet status. Before she died at 90 in 2009, Venetia Burney, who had a long career teaching economics, admitted that she would have preferred that Pluto remain a planet but that it was not a matter of great concern to her. Tombaugh and Burney never met, but they are remembered with two newly-mapped features on Pluto, the Tombaugh Regio, and the Burney Crater.