Pluto and its 5 moons are about to be the nerdiest worlds ever
Get ready to geek out, space fans.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) -- the body responsible for assigning official names to all cosmic objects discovered by Earthlings -- has officially approved naming schemes for features on the surfaces of Pluto and its five moons.
This is good news for all you science fiction nerds out there. The IAU's naming scheme for Charon would allow scientists to name features on the moon after "fictional and mythological voyagers, travelers and explorers," according to NASA.
So yes, you guessed it, this means that Skywalker Crater -- which is a provisional name for one of Charon's holes in the ground -- could become a reality. That also goes for Mordor Macula (which fits with Charon's "destinations and milestones of fictional space and other exploration" theme) and Organa Crater.
NASA scientists working with the New Horizons mission, which flew by Pluto in July 2015, have been informally naming different features on Pluto and its moons for a while in order to easily refer to them in studies and public releases.
The IAU's approved themes now mean that scientists can submit their informal names for approval.
"It's great that we finally have [a] formal naming scheme," New Horizons scientist Simon Porter said via Twitter direct message.
"This is the result of a long process of negotiations with the IAU, which were interrupted for a bit by the encounter itself. In retrospect, that was probably for the best, since the informal names have moved around a bit as we dug into the data, i.e. Sputnik Planum became Sputnik Planitia when we looked at the stereo topography and realized [it] was a low feature, not a high plain."
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The New Horizons team hasn't yet informally named craters on Pluto's small moon Nix, for example, so now they have a theme to follow.
And it's quite the theme. The IAU says that all features on Nix need to be named after "deities of the night." Spooky.
"My personal favorite feature theme is Kerberos, effectively 'Dogs of Exploration,'" Porter added. "And it's a reason to go back, so we can actually image Kerberos in detail and [find] more things to name."
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
