After nearly a half million votes cast by the public, Pluto's two tiniest moons may have new names — one of them possibly being christened after the home world of a famous fictional pointy-eared humanoid named Mr. Spock. Astronomer Michael Showalter and his team who discovered these tiny worldlets put a call out to the internet…
Posted by Breaking Orbit
... little over a year ago Alan Stern, principal investigator on the New Horizons mission, announced the team's plans to have a Forever Stamp issued by the US Postal Service commemorating the New Horizons spacecraft along with its targets, Pluto and Charon. Thousands signed the petition, and today the team announced a long-awaited update to
Posted by Universe Today
The votes have been tallied and the results are in from the SETI Institute's Pluto Rocks Poll: “Vulcan” and “Cerberus” have come out on top for names for Pluto's most recently-discovered moons, P4 and P5. After 450,324 votes cast over the past two weeks, Vulcan is the clear winner with a landslide 174,062 votes… due
Posted by Universe Today
As reported here on Universe Today last week, the SETI Institute has invited the public to vote on the names of Pluto's 4th and 5th moons. Discovered in 2011 and 2012 respectively, researcher and co-discoverer Mark Showalter will take these names before the International Astronomical Union (IAU) after voting closes on February 25th, 2013. But
Posted by Universe Today
Even though Pluto may have been officially kicked out of the major planet club, the number of moons orbiting the dwarf planet has increased by two in just the last couple of years. And now astronomers need your help in naming these newly discovered moons. The naming contest for two of the tiniest satellites, measuring…
Posted by Breaking Orbit
On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of travel through the outer Solar System, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft crossed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around, capturing photos of the planets as seen from that vast distance. It was a family portrait taken from over 4. 4 billion kilometers away — the ultimate
Posted by Universe Today
I've written about this a couple of times before and put up polls here on Lights in the Dark, but now it's actually semi-official: you can vote on the names for Pluto's newest moons! (Looks like they may have taken some of our earlier suggestions too!) Earlier today, February 11 — which, by the way,
Posted by Lights in the Dark
Today marks seven months since the announcement of Pluto'sÂfifth moonÂand over a year and a half since the discovery of theÂone before that. But both moons still have letter-and-number designations, P5 and P4, respectively not very imaginative, to say the least, and not really fitting into the pantheon of mythologically-named worlds in our Solar System.
Posted by Universe Today
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