'Vulcan' Wins Pluto's Moon Naming Contest

The contest to pick Hades-related names for Pluto's fourth and fifth moons is over and the winner will be familiar to Star Trek fans: Vulcan was the runaway winner of the poll at plutorocks.com, taking 174,000 votes out of 475,000 cast for 21 candidates. Vulcan is the nephew of Pluto, mythical lord of the underworld, but it's also the name of Mr. Spock's home planet, and the name was William Shatner's suggestion, USA Today reports.

Cerberus came in second, with almost 100,000 votes, and Styx, Persephone, and Orpheus also made the top five. Some 30,000 suggestions—including Mickey and Minnie—didn't make the ballot. Mark Showalter, a SETI Institute scientist who played a leading role in the discovery of the dwarf planet's newest moons, says he is "delighted by the response" to the contest and will now discuss the names with colleagues on the discovery team, NBC reports. The International Astronomical Union will have the final say on what the moons are called. (More Pluto stories.)