Venetia Burney: The 11-Year-Old Who Named Pluto.

Venetia Burney holds a unique place in astronomy history as the person who named Pluto.

She was born in Oxford, England, in 1918. On the morning of March 14, 1930, shortly after astronomers at the Lowell Observatory in the United States announced the discovery of a new planet beyond Neptune, Venetia’s grandfather, Falconer Madan, read about it in The Times newspaper. Venetia, who was just 11 years old at the time, suggested the name “Pluto,” inspired by the Roman god of the underworld, who could make himself invisible — a fitting name for a distant, cold, and hard-to-see world.

Her grandfather passed the suggestion along to Herbert Hall Turner, an Oxford astronomer, who then cabled it to the Lowell Observatory. The name “Pluto” was unanimously accepted by the astronomers, partly because its first two letters, P and L, also honored Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who had initiated the search for the mysterious “Planet X.”

Venetia Burney later became a teacher and married Edward Phair, a mathematics teacher, becoming known as Venetia Burney Phair. Remarkably, she lived long enough to witness Pluto’s dramatic change in status: in 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. Venetia, then in her late 80s, commented with humor and grace on the decision, showing no regret about the name she had given nearly 80 years earlier. She passed away in 2009 at the age of 90.