'Vulcan' had got a boost because William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the hugely popular sci-fi TV series Star Trek, repeatedly tweeted in its favour. Shatner has 1.3 million Twitter followers. In Star Trek, Vulcan is a planet from where Kirk's companion Spock hails (actually, he is half Vulcan, half human). Vulcans are portrayed as logical, emotionless people. The name Vulcan was not part of the original list put up by the SETI Institute on its dedicated website for the poll, Pluto Rocks!
Cerberus is the name of a mythical three-headed dog that guards Hades, the underworld, of which Pluto is the king. The name will pose a problem for the final selectors as there is already an asteroid in the Solar System with the same name. The organizer of the poll Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute said one option was writing it in the original Greek way as Kerberos.
Vulcan was not part of the original 20 names up for the polls but strong public support made the organizers reconsider and include it in the list. There is some opposition to the name 'Vulcan' because for a long time astronomers thought that there existed another planet between Mercury and the Sun. This was named Vulcan. Many feel that giving a Pluto moon the same name will cause confusion. Vulcan qualifies in other ways because he was the uncle of Pluto.
Another opinion says that Vulcan is the god of volcanoes in Roman mythology and any celestial body named after it should be hot and fiery. Pluto and its moons are frozen ice balls.
Other entrants in the top five out of the total 21 names for which votes were cast were Styx (87,858 votes), Persephone (68,969 votes) and Orpheus (51,197 votes).
Pluto has five moons of which three are already named - Nix, Hydra and Charon. The two unnamed moons - called P4 and P5 temporarily - were discovered in 2011 and 2012 by Showalter and his team of researchers. The rules for naming were that they should derive from Greek or Roman mythology and be related to the underworld.
The poll results do not finalise the selection. Names of celestial bodies are given by the nomenclature working group of the International Astronomical Union. They have indicated that they will take the public's opinion in consideration while choosing the names.
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'Vulcan' and 'Cerberus' win online poll for naming Pluto's two new moons
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