(In passing marks the memory of a person featured in IntLawGrrls) Venetia Burney Phair died on April 30 at age 90 at home in Epsom, south of London, England. As we've posted, she made her mark 8 decades earlier, when as a schoolgirl she suggested that a newly discovered planet be named Pluto. As depicted in the 2008 short film, Naming Pluto (video of trailer below), 11-year-old mythology buff Venetia (left) made the suggestion to her grandfather, an Oxford librarian, who relayed the idea to an Oxford astronomer. The rest is history. Pluto's ignominious 2006 reclassification as a "dwarf planet" by no means dims her celestial achievement. As stated by London's Telegraph, she "had the distinction of being the only woman in the world to have named a planet."
