[Chaos-l] CHAOS, meet Pluto

Thu May 14 09:13:55 EDT 2009

This is interesting thanks.......allen 
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "BOBI GALLAGHER" <vega13705 at verizon.net> 
To: "Jayme Hanzak" <jhanzak at unctv.org>, "CHAOS" <chaos-l at rtpnet.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, May 13, 2009 8:36:36 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern 
Subject: [Chaos-l] CHAOS, meet Pluto 

I had fun reading this. 
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May 11, 2009 
Venetia Phair Dies at 90; as a Girl, She Named Pluto 
By WILLIAM GRIMES 
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. 

And so it was. 

Venetia Phair, as she became by marriage, died April 30 in her home in 
Banstead, in the county of Surrey, England. She was 90. The death was 
confirmed by her son, Patrick. 

Venetia, on the fateful day that Pluto popped into her head, was 
having breakfast with her mother and her grandfather, Falconer Madan, 
retired librarian of the Bodleian Library at Oxford. He had exciting 
news to tell. Scientists at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, 
Ariz., had just photographed a planet lying beyond Neptune. Its 
existence had been postulated since the late 19th century, and 
astronomers working under Percival Lowell, the observatory’s founder, 
had been chasing it photographically since 1906. Now theory had become 
fact. 

“He wondered what it should be called,” Mrs. Phair recalled in the 
documentary film, “Naming Pluto,” released last month. “We all 
wondered, and then I said, ‘Why not call it Pluto?’ And the whole 
thing stemmed from that.” 

Mr. Madan passed the idea along to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, 
professor of astronomy at Oxford. Pluto, he suggested in a letter, was 
an excellent name for “the big obscure new baby.” 

Mr. Turner, as it happened, was in London for a meeting of the Royal 
Astronomical Society, where word of the new planet had members 
buzzing, and proposals for a name flew fast and furious. “I think 
PLUTO excellent!!” he wrote to Mr. Madan on his return. “We did not 
manage to think of anything so good at the RAS yesterday. The only at 
all meritorious suggestion was Kronos, but that won’t do alongside 
Saturn.” (Kronos is the Greek equivalent of Saturn.) 

Mr. Turner immediately sent a telegram to Flagstaff: “Naming new 
planet, please consider PLUTO, suggested by small girl Venetia Burney 
for dark and gloomy planet.” 

Unbeknownst to Venetia, a spirited battle ensued, with suggestions 
flying thick and fast. Minerva looked like the front runner, until it 
was pointed out that the name already belonged to an asteroid. Other 
candidates included Zeus, Atlas and Persephone. The Austrian engineer 
and cosmologist Hans Hörbiger proposed the inscrutable and 
unpronounceable Onehtn, meaning “first trans-Neptune.” 

Capt. Charles E. Freeman, the superintendent of the Naval Observatory 
in Washington, regarded Pluto as a long shot. “Pluto is the prototype 
of Satan in many minds, and drops out for that reason, perhaps,” he 
said. 

In the end, scientists at the Lowell Observatory voted unanimously for 
Pluto, partly because its first two letters could be interpreted as an 
homage to Percival Lowell, and on May 24 the new planet received its 
official name. 

Mr. Madan gave his granddaughter a five-pound note, and the family 
added yet another feather to its cap: in 1877, Mr. Madan’s brother 
Henry, a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two 
dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos, two attendants of the 
Roman war god, whose names mean fear and terror. 

“Pluto is an excellent name, for two reasons,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, 
the director of the Hayden Planetarium and author of “The Pluto Files: 
The Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet,” said in a telephone 
interview. “First, it’s a Roman god, as are the rest of the large 
objects in the solar system, so it conforms to the rules of the time, 
and second, Pluto is the god of the underworld, a distant place you 
don’t want to go to. Who could not love the name?” 

Venetia Katherine Burney was born in Oxford, where her father, the 
Rev. Charles Fox Burney, was a professor of scriptural interpretation. 
He died when Venetia was 6, and she and her mother went to live with 
Mr. Madan. 

Venetia developed an interest in astronomy after playing a game with 
other children in which lumps of clay, standing for the planets, were 
placed on a lawn in their positions relative to the sun. 

She attended Downe House, a boarding school in Berkshire, and, after 
studying mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge, became a chartered 
accountant. She later taught economics and math at two girls’ schools 
in southwest London. In 1947 she married Maxwell Phair, a classicist, 
who became housemaster and head of English at Epsom College. She is 
survived by her son, of Cheltenham. 

Mrs. Phair tended to play down her stroke of genius. She came up with 
Pluto, she said, simply because it was one of the few important Roman 
gods still available for planetary duty. “Whether I thought about a 
dark, gloomy Hades, I’m not sure,” she told the BBC in 2006. 

Regardless, Pluto was an instant success. Walt Disney used it for 
Mickey Mouse’s dog, and it provided the name for Element 94 in the 
Periodic Table, plutonium, which was first identified in 1941. In 1987 
the asteroid 6235 Burney was named in Mrs. Phair’s honor, as was a 
dust-measuring instrument on board New Horizons, the NASA spacecraft 
that took off for Pluto in 2006. 

Mrs. Phair took it in stride when the International Astronomical Union 
decreed that Pluto was not a planet at all. It was a dwarf planet, and 
not even the largest one, a lump of rock and ice orbiting in a ring of 
icy debris known as the Kuiper Belt. 

Some face was saved last year when the union announced the coining of 
the term “plutoid” to designate a dwarf planet beyond the orbit of 
Neptune. 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.” 

Alan M. MacRobert, a senior editor at Sky and Telescope, foresees 
sweeter vindication ahead. “In the year 4,000 A.D., when Pluto is 
hollowed out and millions of people are living inside,” he said, “the 
name of Venetia Burney may be the only thing that Great Britain is 
remembered for.” 

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Jayme Hanzak 
To: CHAOS 
Sent: Tuesday, May 12, 2009 9:55 AM 
Subject: [Chaos-l] Meeting tonight 

Tonight is the night for the CHAOS monthly meeting. Our speaker tonight is Dr. Daniel Reichart of UNC's Physics and Astronomy Department. Dr Reichart subject is about Global Climate Change. It should be an informative meeting. 

Our meetings are held at Carol Woods in the Assembly Hall. Meetings begin at 7pm. Come on out and join us. 

Clear dry skies! 

Jayme Hanzak 
CHAOS President 

CHAOS 
P.O. Box 842 
Chapel Hill, NC 27514-0842 
http://www.rtpnet.org/chaos/ 

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