Capt. Kirk’s Vulcan entry wins Pluto moons contest

MARCIA DUNN

AP Aero­space Writer

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — “Star Trek” fans, rejoice.

An online vote to name Pluto’s two newest, itty-bitty moons is over. And No. 1 is Vul­can, a name sug­gested by actor William Shat­ner, who played Capt. Kirk in the orig­i­nal “Star Trek” TV series.

Vul­can snared nearly 200,000 votes among the more than 450,000 cast dur­ing the two-week con­test, which ended Mon­day. In sec­ond place with nearly 100,000 votes was Cer­berus, the three-headed dog that guarded the gates of the underworld.

Vul­can was the Roman god of lava and smoke, and the nephew of Pluto. Vul­can was also the home planet of the pointy-eared humanoids in the “Star Trek” shows. Think Mr. Spock.

“174,062 votes and Vul­can came out on top of the vot­ing for the nam­ing of Pluto’s moons. Thank you to all who voted!” Shat­ner said in a tweet once the tally was complete.

Actor Leonard Nimoy, who por­trayed the rea­son– and logic-based Spock, had this to say in an email to The Asso­ci­ated Press: “If my peo­ple were emo­tional they would say they are pleased.”

Don’t assume Vul­can and Cer­berus are shoo-ins, though, for the two tiny moons dis­cov­ered over the past two years with the Hub­ble Space Telescope.

The con­test was con­ducted by SETI Insti­tute in Moun­tain View, Calif., the research base for the pri­mary moon hunter. The 10 astronomers who made the dis­cov­er­ies will take the vot­ing results into account, as they come up with what they con­sider to be the two best names.

The Inter­na­tional Astro­nom­i­cal Union has the final say, and it could be another month or two before an edict is forth­com­ing. Now known as P4 and P5, the moons are 15 to 20 miles across.

The leader of the teams that dis­cov­ered the mini-moons, Mark Showal­ter said Mon­day he is lean­ing toward the pop­u­lar vote.

But Showal­ter pointed out that aster­oids thought to orbit close to the sun are called vul­canoids, and there could be some con­fu­sion if a moon of Pluto were to be named Vul­can. Vul­can, in fact, was the name given in the 19th cen­tury to a pos­si­ble planet believed to orbit even closer to the sun than Mer­cury; no such planet ever was found.

What’s more, Showal­ter said in a phone inter­view, Vul­can is asso­ci­ated with lava and vol­ca­noes, while dis­tant Pluto is any­thing but hot.

As for Cer­berus, an aster­oid already bears that name, so maybe the Greek ver­sion, Ker­beros, would suf­fice, said Showal­ter, a senior research sci­en­tist at SETI’s Carl Sagan Center.

Styx landed in No. 3 posi­tion with nearly 88,000 votes. That’s the river to the underworld.

Pluto’s three big­ger moons are Charon, Nix and Hydra.

To be con­sid­ered, the poten­tial names for the two mini-moons also had to come from Greek or Roman mythol­ogy, and deal with the under­world. Twenty-one choices were avail­able at the web­site http://www.plutorocks.com when vot­ing ended Mon­day. Of those, nine were write-in can­di­dates sug­gested by the pub­lic, includ­ing Shatner’s entry for Vulcan.

Shatner’s sec­ond choice for a name, Romu­lus, did not make the cut. That’s because an aster­oid already has a moon by that name — along with a moon named Remus.

And for­get the Dis­ney connection.

“We love Mickey, Min­nie and Goofy, too,” Showal­ter informed vot­ers a few days into the vot­ing. “How­ever, these are not valid names for astro­nom­i­cal objects. Sorry.”

Alto­gether, 30,000 write-in can­di­date names poured in.

Showal­ter said he will keep the list handy as more moons undoubt­edly pop up around Pluto once NASA’s New Hori­zons space­craft arrives in 2015. It will be the first robotic flyby ever of the plan­e­toid, or dwarf planet near the outer fringes of the solar system.

“I have learned not to under­es­ti­mate Pluto,” Showal­ter wrote on the web­site. With so many good names avail­able, “Pluto needs more moons!”

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