Venetia Phair, the person who named Pluto, dies
Pluto as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1994. Credit: Alan Stern (Southwest Research Institute), Marc Buie (Lowell Observatory), NASA and ESA
It’s an old and often told story. In 1930 a grandfather pointed out a newspaper article about the discovery of a new planet in the outer reaches of the solar system to his 11-year grandaughter. The young girl must have had a good knowledge of Roman mythology (maybe just as children today know all about the various types of dinosaurs) for she suggested the name Pluto for the new planet. It was a most appropriate name as Pluto is king of the underworld and has the ability to make himself invisible. That ability fits a distant planet that is faint and hard to find.
There was also another reason, a reason of which young Venetia Burney was unlikely to have been aware, why the name was not only appropriate for the planet, but perfect. This was that the first two letters of Pluto, PL, matched the initials of Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who set up the observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona where the planet was found and who initiated the search for the unknown Planet X. At Lowell’s time there were believed to be still some irregularities in the path of Uranus that the pull of the next planet Neptune did not account for. Lowell used those irregularities to calculate possible positions for Planet X.
When Clyde Tombaugh discovered the new planet in 1930, it was exactly at the predicted position. Yet, today we know that the mass of Pluto is far too small to disturb the path of Uranus in any measurable fashion. So the discovery of what we now call the dwarf planet Pluto must have been a coincidence, a rather fortuitious coincidence.
For more information on Venetia Phair née Burney who died on 30 April 2009 aged 90 see her obituary. As Clyde Tombaugh died in 1997, Venetia’s death removes the last link to an important historical event, the discovery of Pluto.
The obituary mentions that there is an asteroid or minor planet named after her. This is 6235 Burney discovered on 14 November 1987. Like the majority of asteroids, the small rocky object circles the Sun between the paths of Mars and Jupiter. From Earth currently it appears in the constellation of Leo the Lion, only 12° from the planet Saturn. However, it is so faint that even a skilled observer would need a fairly large telescope at a dark place to be able to see it.
3 Responses to “Venetia Phair, the person who named Pluto, dies”
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Laurel Kornfeld on May 12th, 2009
It should be noted that the IAU’s controversial demotion of Pluto is very likely not the last word on the subject and in fact represents only one interpretation in an ongoing debate. Only four percent of the IAU voted on this, and most are not planetary scientists. Their decision was immediately opposed in a formal petition by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. Stern and like-minded scientists favor a broader planet definition that includes any non-self-luminous spheroidal body in orbit around a star. The spherical part is important because objects become spherical when they attain a state known as hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning they are large enough for their own gravity to pull them into a round shape. This is a characteristic of planets and not of shapeless asteroids and Kuiper Belt Objects. Pluto meets this criterion and is therefore a planet.
Nick Lomb on May 12th, 2009
Hello Laurel. Sadly, you are right and the demotion of Pluto to a dwarf planet at the last IAU General Assembly will probably be revisited at this year’s General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro. That tiny Pluto is not a planet should be a no-brainer, but a clique of American astronomers for, I suspect, non-scientific reasons such as patriotism, affection for the memory of Clyde Tombaugh and childhood memories of the lovable Disney dog character by that name would like to reinstate it as a planet. If that happens astronomers and astronomy will be subject to considerable ridicule.
Laurel Kornfeld on May 15th, 2009
Sorry, but you are incorrect. It is not patriotism or Disney or even pride in Clyde Tombaugh that motivated hundreds of professional astronomers, including non-Americans, to sign the petition rejecting the IAU demotion. It is that demotion, which makes no scientific or linguistic sense, that brings ridicule to astronomy.
The IAU definition makes no linguistic sense, as it states that dwarf planets are not planets at all. That’s like saying a grizzly bear is not a bear. Second, it defines objects solely by where they are while ignoring what they are. If Earth were placed in Pluto’s orbit, by the IAU definition, it would not be a planet. That is because the further away an object is from its parent star, the more difficulty it will have in clearing its orbit.
A second reason the IAU definition makes no sense is that it defines objects solely by where they are while ignoring what they are. If Earth were in Pluto’s orbit, according to the IAU definition, it would not be a planet either. A definition that takes the same object and makes it a planet in one location and not a planet in another is essentially useless. These reasons are why many scientists and lay people are working behind the scenes to get the demotion overturned.
Also, the language of “clearing its orbit” is vague and, if applied literally, could potentially exclude all planets in our solar system, as none fully clears its orbit of nearby asteroids, and Neptune does not clear its orbit of Pluto. Also, the “clearing its orbit” criterion precludes any objects in a binary planet system from being considered planets, as by definition, they do not clear their orbits of one another.
In a 2000 paper, Dr. Alan Stern and Dr. Hal Levison distinguish two types of planets—the gravitationally dominant ones and the smaller ones that are not gravitationally dominant. However, they never say that objects in the latter category are not planets.
I attended the Great Planet Debate, which actually took place in August 2008, and there was a strong consensus there that a broader, more encompassing planet definition is needed. I encourage anyone interested to listen to and view the conference proceedings online by googling “Great Planet Debate.”