How Pluto Got Its Name: The 11-Year-Old Girl, the God of the Underworld, and a Hidden Tribute

On the morning of 14th March 1930, an eleven-year-old girl in Oxford sat at the breakfast table while her grandfather read aloud from The Times. Astronomers in Arizona, the paper reported, had discovered a new planet, the first to be found in nearly a century, lurking in the frozen dark beyond Neptune. Her grandfather, Falconer Madan, retired librarian of the Bodleian Library, wondered aloud what it might be called.

Venetia Burney didn't hesitate. "Why not call it Pluto?"

Within weeks, that suggestion, made over toast, by a child with a taste for mythology, had crossed the Atlantic, won a formal vote among astronomers, and given a name to the furthest known world in our solar system. It is, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of planetary naming. And the name itself turned out to be far richer than even Venetia may have realised.

The Long Search for Planet X

To understand why the discovery of Pluto caused such a stir, it helps to understand how long and how obsessively it had been hunted. The hunt began not with the planet itself but with an anomaly, a subtle wobble in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune that suggested something massive was out there, tugging at them from the dark.

Percival Lowell, a wealthy Boston-born astronomer who founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894, became convinced this unseen body was real. He called it Planet X. From 1905 until his death in 1916, he conducted an increasingly consuming search, employing teams of mathematicians to calculate its predicted location and directing his telescope staff to scan the sky night after night. He never found it. Lowell died without knowing whether Planet X was real at all, and his estate became entangled in years of legal disputes over his will. The observatory's search stalled.

It was not revived properly until 1929, when Lowell Observatory director V.M. Slipher hired a twenty-three-year-old self-taught astronomer from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh. Tombaugh had grown up on a farm, never went to university, and had built his own telescopes from spare parts. He first wrote to Lowell Observatory hoping for feedback on his planetary drawings; instead, he received a job offer. He arrived in Flagstaff with a work ethic and a patience that would prove extraordinary.

His method was meticulous. Using a thirteen-inch astrograph, he photographed the same section of sky on different nights, then used a blink comparator, a machine that flipped rapidly between two images, to spot anything that had moved against the fixed background of stars. A star would sit still. A planet would jump. Night after night, plate after plate, Tombaugh estimated he eventually spent 7,000 hours at the blink comparator eyepiece during his fourteen-year career at the observatory.

On the morning of 18th February 1930, examining plates taken in January of the constellation Gemini, he saw it: a tiny point of light that had shifted position. He called his colleagues in, and they confirmed what he had found. Tombaugh walked to the observatory director and said simply: "I have found your Planet X."

The discovery was announced to the world on 13th March 1930, the date that would have been Percival Lowell's 75th birthday.

A Thousand Suggestions and One That Stuck

Naming a planet is not a quiet affair. The Lowell Observatory received around a thousand suggestions from an excited public once news of the discovery broke. Proposals ranged from the classical to the personal, reflecting the social preoccupations of 1930 as much as any astronomical reasoning. Three mythological names eventually rose to the top of the list: Minerva, Cronus, and Pluto.

Minerva was eliminated first, the name had already been assigned to an asteroid. Cronus fell away partly because its primary advocate was an astronomer so widely disliked by his colleagues that supporting his suggestion felt professionally awkward. That left Pluto.

Venetia Burney came from a family with deep roots in the academic world. Her grandfather Falconer Madan had been Bodleian Librarian, and a great-great uncle, Henry Madan, had suggested the names Phobos and Deimos for the moons of Mars in 1878. Venetia had been learning about mythology at school, and she knew that Pluto was the name of the Roman god of the underworld, a realm that was cold, dark, and out of sight. It seemed, she thought, fitting for a world so distant from the Sun.

Falconer Madan, suitably impressed, sent a note to his friend Herbert Hall Turner, a professor at Oxford and former Astronomer Royal. Turner forwarded the suggestion by telegraph to Lowell Observatory on 16th March 1930. The telegram, which survives, misspelled Venetia's surname as "Nurney," a small indignity in an otherwise triumphant story.

On 1st May 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted. The Lowell Observatory Circular announcing the name specifically credited the suggestion to "Miss Venetia Burney, aged 11, of Oxford, England." As a reward, her grandfather gave her five pounds, the equivalent of roughly £350 today.

The Hidden Tribute: P and L

Venetia's choice turned out to contain a happy accident that endeared it to the astronomers at Lowell Observatory above all else. The first two letters of "Pluto" are P and L, the initials of Percival Lowell, the man whose obsession had set the whole search in motion and who had died without knowing whether Planet X was real.

Clyde Tombaugh liked the proposal specifically because of this. And when Pluto was given its astronomical symbol, it combined the letters P and L in a single monogram, both a planetary glyph and a quiet memorial to the man who had devoted eleven years of his life to finding what Tombaugh found in a single morning of blinking plates. It is one of the more elegant coincidences in the history of science.

The God Behind the Name

The decision to name the solar system's new outermost world after the Roman god of the underworld was not simply a matter of fitting the alphabetical convention. It was, within its own logic, deeply appropriate.

In Roman mythology, Pluto was the son of Saturn and brother to Jupiter and Neptune, who had divided the universe between themselves after overthrowing their father. Jupiter took the sky, Neptune the sea, and Pluto inherited the underworld, the realm of the dead, hidden from the living, removed from light and warmth. His name, derived from the Greek Plouton, meant "the wealthy one," reflecting his dominion over the mineral riches buried beneath the earth. He was not, in Roman conception, simply a god of death, he was a god of everything hidden, including the seeds that gestated underground before bursting into spring.

Pluto was also, in classical tradition, associated with invisibility. One version of his mythology gave him a helmet, fashioned by the Cyclopes, that rendered its wearer unseen. This resonated powerfully with an astronomical body that had evaded detection for so long, discovered only by the most painstaking mechanical effort at its edges. Venetia had suggested the right name without perhaps fully knowing why it was so right.

The tradition of naming planets after Roman deities had its roots in antiquity, when the five planets visible to the naked eye, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, were each identified with a god whose qualities seemed to match its observed nature. Mars was red like blood and named for war; Venus was bright and associated with beauty; Saturn moved slowly and was given to the ancient, stern god of time. When Uranus was discovered in 1781 and Neptune in 1846, astronomers maintained the classical convention. Pluto was the natural continuation of that lineage.

Seventy-Six Years as a Planet, Then a Demotion

Pluto held its status as the ninth planet without serious challenge for most of the twentieth century. It appeared in textbooks, on classroom posters, and in the cultural imagination as an eccentric, icy outpost at the edge of everything. The fact that it was smaller than expected, smaller, it eventually emerged, than Earth's Moon, was noted but set aside. It was, everyone assumed, simply a small planet.

The trouble began in the 1990s and accelerated sharply in the 2000s, as astronomers began finding other objects orbiting in the same distant region, the Kuiper Belt. Then, in January 2005, astronomer Mike Brown and his team at Palomar Observatory discovered Eris, a body that was more massive than Pluto. If Pluto was a planet, Eris had to be one too. And if Eris was a planet, the definition was becoming unmanageable, with dozens of Kuiper Belt objects potentially qualifying.

The International Astronomical Union convened a committee to address the problem. On 24th August 2006, after months of debate and argument, the IAU voted on a new definition of "planet". Under the new criteria, a planet must orbit the Sun, must be massive enough that its own gravity pulls it into a roughly spherical shape, and, crucially, must have "cleared its orbital neighbourhood" of other bodies of comparable size. Pluto met the first two conditions. It failed the third, orbiting in a region crowded with Kuiper Belt objects. It was reclassified as a "dwarf planet" and redesignated minor planet 134340.

The public reaction was, by any measure, disproportionate to the event. Textbooks had to be updated. School models of the solar system became obsolete. Memes, opinion pieces, and protest campaigns proliferated online. The word "plutoed", meaning to demote or devalue something, entered dictionaries. The New Mexico and Illinois state legislatures both passed resolutions insisting Pluto was still a planet in their airspace, in honour of Clyde Tombaugh who had connections to both states. Venetia Burney, by then in her late eighties, took the news with considerable equanimity. She had had, she said, the satisfaction of seeing it named. That was enough for her.

New Horizons: Pluto Up Close at Last

For eighty-five years after its discovery, Pluto remained a point of light. Even the most powerful telescopes could resolve it only as a tiny, blurry disc. We knew it existed, but its surface was unknown.

That changed on 14th July 2015, when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto, the first and, so far, the only spacecraft to do so. The images it returned transformed the public's relationship with this small, distant world. Pluto was not a dead, featureless rock. It had mountains as tall as the Rockies, built from water ice. It had a thin but real nitrogen atmosphere. It had reddish snow. And most remarkably, it had a vast, bright, heart-shaped region, now named Tombaugh Regio, after its discoverer, that glows against the darker landscape like something left deliberately, a geological valentine billions of miles from Earth.

On board New Horizons, a small container carries a portion of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes, placed there at the request of his family. The man who discovered Pluto is travelling towards it still. The spacecraft also carries an instrument named the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, in honour of the girl who gave it its name. A crater on Pluto's surface was formally named Burney crater by the International Astronomical Union in 2017.

Pluto in Astrology: The Planet That Changes Everything

The story of how Pluto got its name is also, from an astrological perspective, a story about how a new archetype entered the symbolic vocabulary of the sky. Astrologers had worked for centuries with the seven traditional planets, Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. The discovery of Uranus in 1781 had expanded that language. Neptune in 1846 expanded it further. Pluto's arrival in 1930 completed what many astrologers regard as a trinity of outer transformational planets, bodies so distant and slow-moving that their effects are felt less in individual lives than across generations.

In modern Western astrology, Pluto is associated with the deepest processes of transformation, the death and rebirth of structures, psychological, social, and cultural. It is considered the ruler of Scorpio in modern astrology (in traditional Hellenistic practice, Scorpio's ruler is Mars, and practitioners of classical approaches such as Hellenistic Astrology, including those trained in the tradition of Chris Brennan, whose school has been part of Martyn Shrewsbury's astrological training, often work with the traditional rulerships exclusively). Whatever one's approach, Pluto's symbolic meaning draws directly and unmistakably from its mythological name: the underworld, the hidden, the transformative power of what lies beneath the surface.

In astrological interpretation, Pluto is associated with subconscious forces, the compulsions and drives that operate below conscious awareness. Where Pluto sits in a birth chart is understood, in modern practice, to indicate where transformation is both most feared and most necessary, where power dynamics play out, where the deepest psychological work is eventually demanded. Its connection to the mythological Pluto is not incidental; it is the point. The naming of a celestial body after the god of the underworld was not just poetic. It turned out to be, symbolically, prophetic.

The Jungian dimension here is worth noting. Jung's concept of the shadow, the aspects of the psyche that are repressed, hidden from conscious view, buried beneath the surface of the ego, maps almost directly onto Plutonian symbolism. The work of integration, of descending into one's own underworld and returning transformed, is central to Jungian therapeutic practice. It is precisely the kind of intersection between mythology, psychology, and astrological symbolism that underpins the work at the Wilfred Hazelwood Clinic. Pluto is not, in this framework, merely an astronomical object or a mythological character. It is an image of a process, one that human beings have been trying to name and understand, in various languages, for as long as they have told stories about what happens when you go into the dark and come back changed.

A Name That Held

Venetia Burney lived to ninety, dying in 2009 at her home in Epsom. She became an accountant, then a maths teacher. She gave interviews about her famous breakfast-table suggestion rarely, and with characteristic understatement. When NASA's team visited her at home to present a plaque in honour of the spacecraft instrument bearing her name, she described the whole affair as "very exciting for a small girl, really, at the time."

What she could not have known in 1930 is how completely right her choice was. The name she pulled from a schoolgirl's knowledge of mythology honoured a forgotten astronomer's initials, described a world that was cold and dark and invisible, stood for a god who presided over hidden wealth and transformation, and gave astrologers a word for the deepest processes of psychological change. All of that, from a name suggested at breakfast, before the school run, on a Tuesday morning in Oxford.

Pluto keeps its name. The planet has been reclassified, the orbit renegotiated, the textbooks rewritten, but the name holds, as names given with real imagination tend to.