Venetia Katharine Douglas Phair, née Burney was the first person to suggest the name Pluto for the planet discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930.
Background
Venetia Burney was the daughter of Review Charles Fox Burney, Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford, and his wife Ethel Wordsworth Burney (née Madan). She was the granddaughter of Falconer Madan (1851–1935), Librarian of the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford.
Career
At the time, she was 11 years old and lived in Oxford, England. Falconer Madan"s brother, Henry Madan (1838–1901), Science Master of Eton, had in 1878 suggested the names Phobos and Deimos for the moons of Mars. Clyde Tombaugh liked the proposal because it started with the initials of Percival Lowell who had predicted the existence of Planet X, which they thought was Pluto because it was coincidentally in that position in space.
On 1 May 1930, the name Pluto was formally adopted for the new celestial body.
Burney was educated at Downe House School in Berkshire and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied mathematics. After graduation she became a chartered accountants
Later she became a teacher of economics and mathematics at girls’ schools in southwest London. Her husband, a classicist, later became housemaster and head of English at Epsom College.
She died on 30 April 2009, aged 90, in Banstead in Surrey.
She was buried at Randalls Park Crematorium in Leatherhead in Surrey. 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. Though I suppose I would prefer it to remain a planet."
The asteroid 6235 Burney and Burney Crater on Pluto were named in her honour.
In July 2015 the New Horizons spacecraft was the first to visit Pluto and carried an instrument named Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter in her honour.
Massachusetts rock band The Venetia Fair came up with their name after reading about Venetia Phair, shortly after Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.