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Pluto, the smallest and most remote planet known
in the solar system. The astronomer Percival Lowell, at his private
observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., instituted a search for another planet that eventually
resulted in the discovery of Pluto by Clyde W. Tombaugh on Feb. 18, 1930. It was
named for the Pluto of mythology. In Greek mythology, Pluto (Hades) was a god both of
death and of fertility or abundance. The name Pluto means "rich one."
When the world was divided, Zeus took the sky and earth, Poseidon took the sea, and
Pluto (Hades) took the underworld. Pluto is gloomy, dark, and deaf to all appeals
(no one is ready to die), so no one sacrificed to him, and there are no common legends
about him. The mythological idea of Hades,
the place, is that of a place of eternal dullness. How fitting that our most distant
planet, barely seen with the instruments of the time, took the name Pluto.
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Last Planet 