Pluto's "heart" finally has an official name.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has officially approved 14 names for surface features on Pluto, including "Tombaugh Regio" for the dwarf planet's famous heart and "Sputnik Planitia" for the huge, nitrogen-ice plain that makes up the heart's left lobe.
These two monikers should be familiar to space fans: They were informal names bestowed by the handlers of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which identified the features when it flew by Pluto in July 2015. (The appellations reference Clyde Tombaugh , the American astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930, and the first-ever artificial satellite, the Soviet Union's Sputnik craft, which reached Earth orbit in 1957.) [ Destination Pluto: NASA's New Horizons Mission in Pictures ]
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