A cultural extra: vote to name the moons of Pluto
Hat tip, Dwayne Yancey, who shares this message:
There’s a vote to name two newly-discovered moons of Pluto. It’s unofficial, of course — but it is run by the astronomers who will propose names to the International Astronomical Union.
Styx and Cerebrus had been in the lead — until they added a late entry, proposed by William Shatner (!) — Vulcan.
Now it’s a three-way race.
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February 14, 2013 - 12:25 PM
Well, looks like Vulcan has now pulled into the lead.
Please allow a nerdy rant here: Under astronomical naming conventions, all the names of Pluto’s moons must be associated with the underworld. So there’s also Charon, the ferryman, plus Nix and Hydra. You can look up the history of those.
Styx, of course, is the river that the ferryman carries souls across. Cerebrus is the three-headed dog that guards the entrance, preventing escape.
Those are the two I voted for, because it’s hard to imagine a suite of Plutonian moons without those names in them. (Seems to me they should have come before Nix and Hydra, but the Astronomical Union didn’t consult me.)
Persephone — the wife of Pluto — also seems a good choice, in my view. After that, Orpheus and Eurydice would seem to go together, if you know your classical history. The odds are the New Horizons spacecraft that will pass by Pluto in 2015 will likely turn up some other moons, so perhaps more of these names will have a chance, eh?
As for Vulcan, proposed by William Shatner, he was a nephew of Pluto, so does have some connection. However, there already was a mythical planet of Vulcan, and I don’t mean the one on Star Trek. In the 1800s, a Frenchman thought he had spotted a new planet inside the orbit of Mercury. Given its proximity to the sun, this new planet was given the name Vulcan, on the theory that the blacksmith of the gods spent a lot of time next to a fire. Alas, the discovery of Vulcan could never be confirmed; it was likely just a sunspot.
It would be quite the irony if Vulcan wound up the name, not of a sun-burnt planet inside the orbit of Mercury, but of an frozen rock on the outer fringes of the solar system.
– Dwayne Yancey, senior editor, classical nerd, astronomy buff