Free Crowdsourcing of Solar System World Naming
Vulcan Tops Online Voting to Name Pluto’s Moons’, PC Magazine
“Vulcan was the only candidate in the contest run by the SETI Institute to top 100,000 votes, garnering 174,062 votes out of about half a million cast in online voting that ended Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern. “Cerberus” was the other winning name with 99,432 votes, according to the Los Angeles Times.”
William Shatner’s Campaign to Name One of Pluto’s Moons ‘Vulcan’ Has Highly Logical Outcome, Hollywood.com
“And with Starfleet’s favorite son leading the charge, Vulcan quickly won the vote. “174,062 votes [out of nearly 450,000 cast] and Vulcan came out on top of the voting for the naming of Pluto’s moons. Thank you to all who voted!” Shatner tweeted. Leonard Nimoy, who as Spock is probably Vulcan’s best known ambassador, told the Associated Press, “If my people were emotional they would say they are pleased.”
Name Pluto’s Moons P4 and P5, earlier post
Vulcan? As a moon of Pluto?? Illogical!!
Silly. Everyone knows that the Vulcan homeworld orbits 40-Eridani-A, 16 light years from Earth.
Actually, as of the 2009 Star Trek movie, the planet Vulcan no longer exists, so that name is up for grabs again.
In the real world, one argument against Vulcan is that before Einstein’s theories explained the orbit of Mercury, there was (if I’m remembering this correctly) a search for another small planet closer to the Sun to explain an oddness in Mercury’s orbit. It was suspected that another small unseen planet was perturbing Mercury’s orbit, and the name proposed for this suspected planet was Vulcan. (It turned out there was no other planet; it was Einstein’s mass/energy equivalence that explained it.) However, this Vulcan is at the opposite end of the solar system to Pluto’s neighborhood, so it seems like too much of a position shift to revive the same name for it.
There is already an asteroid named Cerberus (1865 Cerberus). Bet IAU won’t like that. But there is an alternate Greek version: Kerberos. Too bad they didn’t pick Orthros (brother dog of Kerberos) instead of Vulcan. But thats how popular elections go.