And Sleipnir Fossa is named after an eight-legged horse that carried Odin to the underworld in Norse sagas.Following the 2015 flyby by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) has approved the first 14 designations for features on Pluto’s surface.

Djanggawul Fossae is named after beings who traveled from the underworld to Australia in aboriginal tales. These include Virgil Fossae, named after the poet Virgil, who served as Dante's guide through hell in the Divine Comedy.

The rest are fossae (Latin for trench), or deep gashes in Pluto's surface. Adlivun Cavus is named after the Inuit underworld. All the rest of the features in this category, however, appropriately go to surface depressions. Tartarus Dorsa is a ridge named after Tartarus, the deepest part of the Greek Underworld. Pluto is the Roman version of the god of the underworld, and many of the other features that received names come from other mythologies. Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, gets more than a crater Tombaugh Reggio is a large region of rough terrain that forms the southeast border of Sputnik Planitia. Elliot crater is named after James Elliot, who helped develop the technique that discovered Pluto's atmosphere. Venetia Burney was only 11 years old when she suggested that the newly discovered planet be named Pluto there's now a Burney Crater in her honor. Advertisementĭiscoveries related to Pluto will apparently let you get a mark on it in the form of a crater. Going south along the western edge of the Planitia, you'd reach Hillary Montes and Tenzing Montes, named after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first people to summit the tallest mountain on Earth. Approved names include the Al-Idrisi Montes, located to the northwest of Sputnik Planitia and named after a famed Arabic explorer and cartographer. Human explorers get montes, or mountains. There are proposals for Pioneer, Venera, and Viking Terra as well, but these haven't been formally accepted yet. Other spacecraft honored include Hayabusa and Voyager, which each get a Terra, or large area of rugged terrain. Sputnik Planitia is a clear example of the overarching theme identified for naming Pluto's features: famed explorers, human or otherwise. But well before this new announcement, that had been changed to Sputnik Planitia in order to bring it in line with naming conventions. The large, heart-shaped plane was originally termed Sputnik Planum in honor of humanity's first orbital hardware. Now, 14 of the monikers have officially entered the record.Īt least one of the names has already undergone a change from the initial weeks after New Horizons' visit. While members of the scientific team behind the New Horizons probe had used a variety of names both informally and in academic publications, there was always the chance that those names would be tweaked or changed entirely. On Thursday, the International Astronomical Union announced that it had officially accepted the names for 14 features on the surface of the dwarf planet Pluto.

Sleipnir fossa