Venetia Phair

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Venetia Phair at age 11

Venetia Phair (née Burney) (born 1919) was the first person to suggest the name Pluto for the planet^[1] discovered by Clyde W. Tombaugh in 1930. At the time, she was 11 years old and lived in Oxford, England.

Burney was the great-niece of Henry Madan (1838–1901), Science Master of Eton, who in 1878 had suggested the names Phobos and Deimos for the moons of Mars.^[2] Her grandfather Falconer Madan (1851–1935), Librarian of the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, was the brother of Henry Madan.^[3]

On March 14, 1930, Falconer Madan read the story of the new planet's discovery in The Times of London, and mentioned it to his granddaughter Venetia. She suggested the name Pluto — the Roman God of the Underworld who was able to make himself invisible — and Falconer Madan forwarded the suggestion to astronomer Herbert Hall Turner, who cabled his American colleagues at Lowell Observatory. Tombaugh liked the proposal because it started with the initials of Percival Lowell who had predicted the existence of Pluto. On May 1, 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted for this new celestial body.

Venetia grew up to be a teacher and married a man named Maxwell Phair. As of 2007, she is 88 years old and living in Epsom. Only a few months before the reclassification of Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet, with the debate going on about the issue, she said in an interview that "At my age, I've been largely indifferent to [the debate]; though I suppose I would prefer it to remain a planet."^[4]

The asteroid 6235 Burney was named in her honour. The Student Dust Counter, an instrument on board the New Horizons spacecraft, is also named after her.^[5]