Once you have pictures of a never-before-seen-up-close almost-planet, you have to start naming what you see. And according to an image of from the New Horizons press room that our correspondent Nick Stockton tweeted earlier today, the Plutonians have started naming their surroundings...informally.
The names are all related to various mythologies of the underworld, appropriately enough. They also suggest that some of these researchers are pretty darn nerdy—though some of the names seem to have come from votes people submitted online during New Horizons' flight.
Like, for example, "Cthulu," the name of an elder god from the fiction of HP Lovecraft. Or what about "Balrog," the name of the monster that seemingly killed Gandalf the Grey in the Lord of the Rings trilogy? Meng-p'o is the Buddhist goddess of forgetfulness and amnesia—she lives in the underworld. Hun-Came and Vucub-Came are Mayan death gods.
We thought at first that Krun was a reference to a Non-Player Character from the hellfire peninsula in World of Worldcraft, but he's actually one of five lords of the underworld for the Mandaeans, an ancient religion from the Iraq-Iran region. (His nickname is "Mountain-of-Flesh.") Ala is an underworld and harvest goddess of the Ibo people of eastern Nigeria.
Pluto might not technically be a planet, but it has some great place-names.
