Πλούτων

Plouton — Pluto — was the Greek and Roman god of the underworld and of the wealth hidden beneath the earth. His name derives from the Greek ploutos, 'wealth,' a euphemism: the Greeks were reluctant to speak the true name of the death god (Hades) and so called him 'the wealthy one,' referring to the precious metals and gems buried in his subterranean realm. The Romans adopted the name as Pluto and conflated him with their own underworld deity, Dis Pater.

On February 18, 1930, the young astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, discovered a faint object beyond Neptune's orbit. He was twenty-four years old, a Kansas farm boy who had built his own telescopes and sent his drawings to the observatory hoping for work. The discovery of the ninth planet was announced on March 13, 1930 — the 149th anniversary of Herschel's discovery of Uranus. The question of what to name it electrified the public.

In Oxford, England, an eleven-year-old girl named Venetia Burney was eating breakfast with her grandfather, Falconer Madan, a retired Bodleian Library librarian. When he mentioned the new planet, she suggested 'Pluto' — it was dark and far away, like the underworld. Madan passed the suggestion to the astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, who cabled it to Lowell Observatory. The staff voted unanimously for Pluto on May 1, 1930. Walt Disney named his cartoon dog Pluto that same year, likely in honor of the planet.

On August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a 'dwarf planet,' stripping it of full planetary status because it had not 'cleared the neighborhood' of its orbit. The decision was controversial and remains so. Clyde Tombaugh had died in 1997; Venetia Burney, then eighty-seven, told the BBC she was not particularly bothered. A portion of Tombaugh's ashes is aboard the New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, and sent back the first detailed photographs of the god of wealth's distant domain.