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Girl Who Named Pluto, At 11, Dies At 90
notthepainter notes the passing of the woman who, as an 11-year-old girl, named Pluto. "Frozen and lonely, Planet X circled the far reaches of the solar system awaiting discovery and a name. It got one thanks to an 11-year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, an enthusiast of the planets and classical myth. On March 14, 1930, the day newspapers reported that the long-suspected 'trans-Neptunian body' had been photographed for the first time, she proposed to her well-connected grandfather that it be named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. Venetia Phair, as she became by marriage, died April 30 in her home in Banstead, in the county of Surrey, England. She was 90. ... More vexing to Mrs. Phair was the persistent notion that she had taken the name from the Disney character. 'It has now been satisfactorily proven that the dog was named after the planet, rather than the other way around,' she told the BBC. 'So, one is vindicated.' " Venetia's great-uncle Henry, who was a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos.
How is this even a story? Maybe if she had named a REAL planet...
If she would only have named it Goofy, she could have lived to 100.
Ripping off public domain folk tales was not enough. They had to go after the planets, too.
We'll forever remember your contribution(s) to the scientific community.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
If you knew your history or had read the article linked in the header, you would.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/sciencemath/8964/zoom/
Rock on, Venetia, rock on.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
she lived to see it lose its planet status... couldn't those selfish astronomers, astrophysicists and cosmologists waited a few more years?
&&FP
The Admin and the Engineer
Now THAT is a nerd's nerd. At the age of eleven, names a planet after a Roman god. I can just picture it now. "Grandfather, I rather think that naming it aaaafter the god Pluto might be the most appropriate course." Maybe I've seen too many Fruit Newton commercials, though.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm glad you got marked troll. Like 90% of us were coming here to make the exact same joke and now we know how the response would have been.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
TFA quotes Neil deGrasse Tyson saying "Pluto is the god of the underworld, a distant place you don't want to go to," and Capt. Freeman saying "Pluto is the prototype of Satan in many minds..."
The Greek underworld is more akin to the entire Christian afterlife. Sure, it had Hell-like Tartarus, but it also had the Heaven-like Elysian Fields (in French: Champs-Elysees), and plenty of places between.
And Pluto/Hades was certainly no Satan! In at least one myth, the brothers Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades drew lots to see who would rule the air, sea, and underworld. Zeus drew first and chose air. Poseidon was thrilled, because he wanted the sea anyway. And poor Hades was stuck with the underworld.
Also from TFA, "...scientists at the Lowell Observatory voted unanimously for Pluto, partly because its first two letters could be interpreted as an homage to Percival Lowell..." Very cool.
but it's still not a planet.
Sorry, karma burning a hole in my pocket
Or the summary, for that matter.
Plutonic?
Astrological etymologies:
Mercurial - unpredictable temperment
Venereal - sexually indulgent
Lunatic - crazy
Martial - war-like
Saturnine - gloomy
Jovial - happy
But "nepotism" is from nephew, not Neptune. And "platonic" is from Plato, not Pluto.
Lost on a fog-bound spit of sand
In shoes that pinched me, across the strand
I hear the plosh of Charon's oar,
Who ferrys no one to a happy shore.
Don't they mean Planet IX?
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
What do we do about Pluto Nash?
Hulu! An evil Alien plot to destroy the world!
"I'm a dirty white tomcat, enter my world..."
So where's the C&D letter against Disney for using the name she coined for a planet?
Surely it causes consumer confusion.. I mean, when I see titles like The Complete Pluto, Volume One; I expect a DVD authorized by the foundation or scientists who discovered the planet, and it to be about the planet.
But instead the proper trade name as assigned the Pluto brand planet is used with a piece of fiction in a manner that is not only confusing but dilutes the mark...
I say we should call it a dwarf death...
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
"When I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and I feel quite certain I shall keep my resolution. Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race - as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing "Pluto." I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth - and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants."
"Without curiosity and knowledge, the mind is a vast void. Without the mind, curiosity and knowledge are nonexistent."
Neither Neptune nor Pluto are ever bright enough to be visible to the naked eye. In optimal conditions and near its opposition with Earth, Uranus can be visible to someone with excellent eyesight.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Billie Piper is kind of hot...
Known in the scientific community as a "Dwarf Woman."
or a couple of mirrors. Oh wait, your anus? That's visible to most anyone, mister playboy. :)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
My attention span got me halfway through the summary and then I got distracted by topless photos of Carrie Prejean.
When I was your age, Pluto was Planet X!
-Venetia Phair
They changed that name to end that stupid joke years ago. Now we call it you're in us.
Neptune was not discovered via direct observation. It was discovered by abnormalities in Uranus' orbit.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
According to Futurama I thought it was Urectum.
Cheers, Chris
Yes, but they did actually change it to be pronounce Urine us.
correlation does not imply causation, this is no proof that naming planets causes death. (Come on, someone had to say that, this is /.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
She just died now? So her copyright is still valid for another 70 years! Quick, somebody sue the solar system!
Best regards to the family.
But... the future refused to change.
It should be noted that the IAUâ(TM)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 NASAâ(TM)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.
Wait... so Pluto was called "Planet X" before it had a name, and it's no longer officially a planet?
So that means it used to be Planet X, but now it's an ex-planet!
My wife [a senior nurse] came home from work one day about 4 years ago saying that she and her staff had been looking after an old lady on a ward at Epsom General Hospital. One of the surgeons pointed her out and said she was rather special since had named the planet Pluto. Apparently the old lady was very pleasant and polite but hadn't told anyone of her claim to fame.
Not really believing this story I googled a bit and found a name. My wife refused to tell me the name of the woman but when I said 'Venetia Phair' she was very surprised as she thought the whole thing was a massive wind-up.
Oh, don't get me started on Billie Piper. Not only is she unattractive, she can't act.
She's hardly a sterling example of a hot British girl, of which there are many.
Is that what that Queen song Radio Gaga is about?
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Who changed it? The International Court of English Language Pronunciation? Oh, that doesn't exist.
It was your-anus when I was born and it will be your-anus to the day I die. And anyway who tries to tell me how to pronounce my own language can fuck right off.
is she hott or not?
And yet I'd still hit it.
OOI, do you think that Ceres, all the other spherical KBOs and so on, should be planets too?
I don't think there's anything wrong with such a definition - we have hundreds of moons, some only about a kilometer in diameter, so why not for planets too? But what was inconsistent, and needed to be fixed, was having Pluto a planet, whilst everything else of similar (or even larger) size was not a planet.
Planet X was the name given to a hypothetical fifth gas giant that could influence the orbit of Neptune and account for the discrepancies between the computed orbit and the observed orbit. It later turned out that one of the two (though I forget which) was slightly off, and when corrected the theory matched the observations exactly, and no Planet X was needed.
How do they know both weren't named after the Roman god?
I rather think that Ms. Phair would have enjoyed this song by Clare and the Reasons.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Yes, I think Ceres and all the other spherical KBOs should be considered planets too. It's okay to call them dwarf planets since they do not gravitationally dominate their orbits. However, it makes no sense to say, as the IAU definition does, that dwarf planets are not planets at all! This is one reason the IAU definition didn't fix anything; it only further confused matters and took attention away from the discovery of the new planets Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.
Didn't the people that did vote for demotion do it in a way that locked out a majority of the voters? I seem to recall that the vote was set up in a rather shady way, when many of the participants weren't present, basically guaranteeing the result they hoped for, and when the rest of the membership found out, they hit the roof.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Hmpf!!
Seriously, dude, I dislike the President as much as the next guy, but you're slipping into moonbat territory there.
You make a claim like that, you gotta support it with at least two links, and one of 'em kinda needs to be a mainstream journal of record. (not so much for the credibility, but for the "your own man says so" house rule)
Geez man, quit making us (Obama detractors) look bad.
It doesn't really matter she named something that will outlive us all here. She doesn't seemed to have done much more than have existed as a good human, and that's more than many of us will ever be. Respect please.
She didn't dies, she died.
Hamlet dies, everyone dies. But a person dies just the once.
She died. She is dead. Stop trying to make her less dead by avoiding the past tense.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
The odds are pretty good that Pluto will outlive the human race.
The odds are equally good, I'd say, that both will cease to exist at the same time - likely because somebody found out that Pluto was a clump of some mineral massively valuable on Earth, and decided to drive it back to Earth to harvest...and for the last time, somebody used English units of measure when everybody else was using metric.
Then Britain would really have the last laugh.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
? Are you guys for real. Pluto was a planet til a few years ago some astronomers decided it wasn't. From the late 1920's til then it was a planet. So it needed a name and She named it.Disney had nothing to do with it. Not that I like disney. But this whole conversation is way beyond reality.