Vulcan and Cerberus Win Public Vote to Name Pluto's Moons

That’s it. We’ve got a winner. Vulcan and Cerberus have been chosen by public vote to name the two smallest moons of Pluto.

The contest organized by SETI institute ended Monday at 9 a.m. (PST), and Vulcan was the only candidate with more than 100,000 votes. In fact, it blew away the rest of the field with 174,062 votes from people all over the world.

Among the voters who chose the Roman god of fire was no other than William Shatner, who gained worldwide fame and became a cultural icon for his portrayal of James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, in the science fiction television series, Star Trek.

“So what do you think of the idea of naming the two moons of Pluto Vulcan and Romulus?” he asked of his 1.35 million followers. One day later, he tweeted this update: “Did you hear? They added the name Vulcan to the list of possible names for Pluto's moons! You did it! I'm so happy.” Then he exhorted his followers to vote for Vulcan more than a dozen times with tweets such as this: “It's a new day- at least here in Los Angeles- have you voted for Vulcan?”

On Monday morning, he shared the news: “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!”

Pluto, once categorized as a full-blown planet, has been downgraded several years ago to dwarf planet status. A stricter set of rules now define a planet and Pluto falls short in some of them. For a celestial body to be called a planet must comply with all three of the following requisites:

• It needs to be in orbit around the Sun;
• It needs to have enough gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape;
• It needs to have “cleared the neighborhood” of its orbit. Here’s the rule breaker. According to this, Pluto is not a planet.