IAU “Styxs” It to Vulcan
It’s bad news for Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and fans of Star Trek everywhere. The international organization responsible for officially naming celestial bodies has rejected the name “Vulcan” for one of the two newest moons discovered in orbit around Pluto. Vulcan, the name of Mr. Spock’s home planet, was the top vote-getter in a moon-naming contest sponsored by the SETI Institute, a research organization that searches for life beyond Earth. The moons were found by astronomers at the institute in 2011 and 2012 using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Instead of Vulcan, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) chose Styx and Kerberos as the names for the fourth and fifth moons of Pluto. Styx was the gloomy river in Hades, the land of the dead, which was ruled by the god Pluto. Kerberos is the Greek version of Cerberus, the name of the three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to Hades. The IAU said it changed the spelling of the name “to avoid confusion with an asteroid called 1865 Cerberus.”
The ballot for SETI’s “Pluto Rocks” project included 12 names from Greek and Roman mythology related to the god Pluto, known as Hades in Greek mythology. Vulcan became a write-in candidate at the suggestion of actor William Shatner, who starred in the Star Trek science-fiction television and film series. “Vulcan” collected 174,062 of the 450,324 votes cast. Cerberus and Styx came in second and third, respectively.
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A photograph of Pluto and its satellites taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 shows all five of the planet's known moons. (NASA/JHUAPL)
In Roman mythology, Vulcan was the god of fire, metalworking, and skilled craftwork in general. Although he did not dwell in Hades, he was a nephew of Pluto and was believed to have his blacksmith’s forge beneath Mount Etna in Sicily. Vulcan is also the name of the fictional home planet of Spock, the half-human first officer to Shatner’s Captain James T. Kirk. However, the IAU rejected Vulcan because it “had already been used for a hypothetical planet between Mercury and the Sun.” In addition, the organization explained, “Although this planet was found not to exist, the term ‘vulcanoid’ remains attached to any asteroid existing inside the orbit of Mercury, and the name Vulcan could not be accepted for one of Pluto’s satellites (also, Vulcan does not fit into the underworld mythological scheme).”
- Pluto was discovered by Clyde W. Tombaugh in 1930, based on predictions by astronomer Percival Lowell in 1905. The name for Tombaugh’s planet was suggested by Venetia Phair, an 11-year-old British girl. Long considered the ninth planet in the solar system, Pluto was “demoted” from planet to a new category of space object called dwarf planet after astronomers in the 1990′s found many objects similar to Pluto in the outer reaches of the solar system, in an area called the Kuiper belt. Pluto’s other three moons are Charon, named for the ragged old boatman who ferried the shades (spirits) of the dead across the Styx or other rivers of the underworld; Hydra, a many-headed serpent that had its den at the entrance to Hades; and Nix, the goddess of the night.
Additional World Book articles:
- New Horizons
- Space exploration
- Exploring the Suburban Solar System (a special report)
- Astronomy 1930 (Back in Time article)
- Astronomy 1978 (Back in Time article)
- Astronomy 2006 (Back in Time article)
- Space exploration 2006 (Back in Time article)
