Vulcan dreams shattered as Pluto's moons get Greek names

Sorry, Star Trek fans. Despite the best efforts of over 100,000 trekkies, Pluto will not have a moon named Vulcan in honour of Spock’s home planet.

The discoverers of Pluto’s two tiniest moons at the Carl Sagan Center of SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, had initiated a competition named ‘Pluto Rocks’, in which they invited the public to vote for their favourite names.

[caption id=“attachment_925661” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The most detailed view to date of the entire surface of Pluto: Reuters[/caption]

‘Vulcan’ won by a landslide, but was rejected by the International Astronomical Union’s official nomenclature committee. Instead they chose Kerberos and Styx. In Greek mythology, Kerberos is the three headed dog who guards the underworld while the Styx is a river separating Earth from the underworld.

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Prior to the announcement the two moons were referred to merely as P4 and P5.

The Wired quoted Mark Showalter, the SETI Institute scientist who discovered P4 in 2011 and P5 in 2012, as saying he hoped the public would be pleased with the decisions. “I don’t think anybody’s ever tried quite the scale of an Internet poll as we did,” he said.

In a press statement announcing the names of the winners, the IAU said,

Showalter submitted Vulcan and Cerberus to the IAU where the Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature (WGPSN) and the Committee on Small Body Nomenclature (WGSBN) discussed the names for approval.

However, the name Vulcan has already been used for a hypothetical planet between Mercury and the Sun. Although this planet was found not to exist, the term “vulcanoid” remains attached to any asteroid existing inside the orbit of Mercury. This is why Vulcan could not be accepted for one of Pluto’s satellites (also, Vulcan does not fit into the underworld mythological scheme). Instead the third most popular name was chosen - Styx, which aside from the mythical river is also the name of the goddess who ruled over the river.

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Vulcan was not on the original list of names that was submitted to the competition, but got added to the list after a suggestion by William Shatner, the original James T Kirk. The decision of the IAU to veto his suggestion predictably did not go down well with Shatner:

Here is a Google image of the voting and results:

[caption id=“attachment_925691” align=“alignnone” width=“604”]  The voting for Pluto[/caption]