The only woman ever to have named a planet passed away April 30 at the age of 90. Venetia Katherine Douglas Phair (née Burney) suggested the name “Pluto” to her grandfather March 14, 1930, when she was 11 years old.
Astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh, working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, found the planet February 18 of that year, but the observatory waited until March 13 to announce the discovery.
Venetia’s suggestion impressed her grandfather, the former librarian of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. He communicated it to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, one of Oxford’s professors of astronomy. Turner, who also liked the name, quickly forwarded it to Lowell Observatory.
Two things about Venetia’s suggestion delighted the astronomers at Lowell. First, no astronomical object carried the name Pluto. Second, the first two letters of the name were the initials of the observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell. Well, one thing led to another, and on May 1, 1930, the world astronomical community adopted Pluto as the new planet’s name.
Pluto stayed a planet until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) demoted it to dwarf planet status. Asked about the change at the time, Venetia Phair said, “It’s interesting that as they come to demote Pluto, so interest in it seems to have grown.”
That decision caused an uproar among astronomers, so in July 2008 the IAU again changed Pluto’s status. Currently, Pluto is the namesake of a group of bodies called “plutoids,” but stay tuned. That may not be the last word used to describe the world Tombaugh found.
[photo: Venetia Phair at her home in Epson, Surrey, England, July 5, 2008. Photo courtesy Martin George]