Our Mythos Solar System - Part 2

Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 and was originally considered to be the ninth planet from the Sun. After 1992, its status as a planet was questioned following the discovery of several objects of similar size in the Kuiper belt. In 2005, Eris, a dwarf planet in the scattered disc which is 27% more massive than Pluto, was discovered. This led the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to define the term “planet” formally in 2006, during their 26th General Assembly. That definition excluded Pluto and reclassified it as a dwarf planet.

Pluto is the largest and second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System, and the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume but is less massive than Eris. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is primarily made of ice and rock and is relatively small—about one-sixth the mass of the Moon and one-third its volume. It has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit during which it ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units (AUs) (4.4–7.4 billion km) from the Sun. This means that Pluto periodically comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, but a stable orbital resonance with Neptune prevents them from colliding. Light from the Sun takes about 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its average distance (39.5 AUs).

Pluto has five known moons: Charon (the largest, with a diameter just over half that of Pluto), Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary system because the barycentre of their orbits does not lie within either body.

On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto. During its brief flyby, New Horizons made detailed measurements and observations of Pluto and its moons. In September 2016, astronomers announced that the reddish-brown cap of the north pole of Charon is composed of tholins, organic macromolecules that may be ingredients for the emergence of life, and produced from methane, nitrogen and other gases released from the atmosphere of Pluto and transferred about 19,000 km (12,000 mi) to the orbiting moon.

The discovery made headlines around the globe. Lowell Observatory, which had the right to name the new object, received more than 1,000 suggestions from all over the world, ranging from "Atlas" to "Zymal". Constance Lowell proposed "Zeus", then "Percival" and finally, "Constance". These suggestions were disregarded.

The name Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld, was proposed by Venetia Burney (1918–2009), an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England, who was interested in classical mythology. She suggested it in a conversation with her grandfather Falconer Madan, a former librarian at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, who passed the name to astronomy professor Herbert Hall Turner, who cabled it to colleagues in the United States.

Each member of the Lowell Observatory was allowed to vote on a short-list of three potential names: “Minerva” (which was already the name for an asteroid), “Cronus” (which had lost reputation through being proposed by the unpopular astronomer Thomas Jefferson Jackson See), and “Pluto”. Pluto received every vote. The name was announced on May 1, 1930. Upon the announcement, Madan gave Venetia £5 (equivalent to about 300 British pounds, or 450 US Dollars) as a reward.

The final choice of name was helped in part by the fact that the first two letters of Pluto are the initials of Percival Lowell. Pluto’s astronomical symbol (♇) was then created as a monogram constructed from the letters “PL”. Pluto’s astrological symbol resembles that of Neptune, but has a circle in place of the middle prong of the trident.

The name was soon embraced by wider culture. In 1930, Walt Disney was apparently inspired by it when he introduced a canine companion named Pluto for Mickey Mouse, although Disney animator Ben Sharpsteen could not confirm why the name was given. In 1941, physicist Glenn T. Seaborg named the newly created element plutonium after Pluto, in keeping with the tradition of naming elements after newly discovered planets, following uranium, which was named after Uranus, and neptunium, which was named after Neptune.

Most languages use the name “Pluto” in various transliterations. In Japanese, astronomer Houei Nojiri suggested the translation “Meiosei” (“Star of the King/God of the Underworld”), and this was borrowed into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese (which instead uses “Sao Diem Vu’o’ng”, which was derived from the Chinese term “Yanwang”, as “minh” is a homophone for the Sino-Vietnamese words for “dark” and “bright”). Some Indian languages use the name Pluto, but others, such as Hindi, use the name of Yama, the God of Death in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. Polynesian languages also tend to use the indigenous god of the underworld, as in the Maori “Whiro”.

So much for what is generally accepted.

According to de Longnez, the planet has been known as “Yuggoth”, or “Iukkoth”, since the Hyperborean Age. There is a question here though, as some Mythos sources refer to the planet Yuggoth as a distant planet having an orbit perpendicular to that of the other Solar System objects; others claim that Yuggoth was destroyed and that its remains comprise the Asteroid Belt beyond Mars. De Longnez’s work is of no assistance: the section referring to the planet comes after that on Neptune in his book and the assumption is that this indicates that – to his understanding – the planet comes after Neptune in the physical sequence. However, his insights on Yuggoth may be read as the start of a latter section in the book which discusses random celestial phenomena, such as gas clouds and “gateways”; visiting objects like comets and asteroids; and other objects which have “vanished”, or which have been destroyed. Further, in discussing the “Music of the Spheres” he makes no reference to Yuggoth as part of the phenomenon.

There is part of an invocation used by the Mi-Go that seems to pin down the discrepancy:

“…on the wings of night out beyond space…to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim…”

However, even this fragment is inconclusive, although it does seem to put paid to a notion of Yuggoth being a celestial body between Mars and Jupiter, now blown to fragments.

According to de Longnez, Yuggoth is populated by a race of insectoid beings, along the lines of locusts but with human-like intelligence. He claims that they inhabit vast cities of tall, windowless black towers beside warm seas and rivers of pitch, crossed by enormous bridges. They are industrious and mine for strange ores, in particular an alien metal which they call “tok’l”. De Longnez characterises them as being cruel and despotic, given to the worship of obscure and malevolent deities. He tells of a cataclysm which drove them from their home planet to nearby L’gy’hx (Uranus), where they attempted to subjugate that planet’s dominant species.

At this point, it seems as though de Longnez begins to conflate the Mi-Go with another interstellar race known as the Shan, or the Insects of Shaggai. Accordingly, we will put off further investigation of this line of thought until later.

Sources also indicate that the Mi-Go were not the first race to lay claim to the planet. It is said that, in one of the vast cities of the Fungi, there are a group of colossal green pyramids around which the metropolis has grown and the proximity to which requires the city to be abandoned at regular intervals. Could this be the lair of the ever-hungry Cxaxukluth? Or is there some other explanation?

Yuggoth has served as a “jumping-off point” for several major Mythos entities travelling to Earth or to other points in our Solar System. As we have seen, Tsathoggua and its kind were spawned on the planet before leaving to other locales; the primogenitor of their race, Cxaxukluth, may still inhabit Yuggoth, having been abandoned there. According to the Revelations, Glaaki is supposed to have stopped on Yuggoth before descending to Earth, as did the entity, Rhan Tegoth. Such heavy traffic leads one to think that perhaps the planet is some kind of nexus which facilitates travel across the vastness of space. Is it possible that the fabled Great White Space – supposedly a massive interstellar bridge across the cosmos – has an entry or exit point upon this planet? Or is it this planet at all?

Caltech researchers have found evidence suggesting there may be a “Planet X” deep in the solar system. This hypothetical Neptune-sized planet orbits our sun in a highly elongated orbit far beyond Pluto. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed “Planet Nine”, could have a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbit about 20 times farther from the sun on average than Neptune which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles and orbits the Sun roughly every 165 years. It may take between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years for Planet X to make one full orbit around the sun.

The announcement does not mean there is a new planet in our solar system. The existence of this distant world is only theoretical at this point and no direct observation of the object has been made. The mathematical prediction of a planet could explain the unique orbits of some smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, a distant region of icy debris that extends far beyond the orbit of Neptune. Astronomers are now searching for the predicted planet.

Given the downgrading in status of Pluto to a dwarf planet, and taking into account the exaggerated orbit of the projected “Planet Nine”, could it be that we’ve been discussing this undiscovered satellite, rather than Pluto, all along? Time, as they say, will tell…

Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. It has the third-largest planetary radius and fourth-largest planetary mass in the Solar System. Uranus is similar in composition to Neptune, and both have different bulk chemical composition from that of the larger gas giants Jupiter and Saturn. For this reason, scientists often classify Uranus and Neptune as “ice giants” to distinguish them from the gas giants. Uranus's atmosphere is similar to Jupiter's and Saturn's in its primary composition of hydrogen and helium, but it contains more “ices” such as water, ammonia, and methane, along with traces of other hydrocarbons. It is the coldest planetary atmosphere in the Solar System, with a minimum temperature of 49 K (−224  C, or −371  F), and has a complex, layered cloud structure with water thought to make up the lowest clouds and methane the uppermost layer of clouds. The interior of Uranus is mainly composed of ices and rock.

Uranus is the only planet whose name is derived directly from a figure from Greek mythology, from the Latinised version of the Greek god of the sky Ouranos. Like the other giant planets, Uranus has a ring system, a magnetosphere, and numerous moons. The Uranian system has a unique configuration among those of the planets because its axis of rotation is tilted sideways, nearly into the plane of its solar orbit. Its north and south poles, therefore, lie where most other planets have their equators. In 1986, images from Voyager 2 showed Uranus as an almost featureless planet in visible light, without the cloud bands or storms associated with the other giant planets. Observations from Earth have shown seasonal change and increased weather activity as Uranus approached its equinox in 2007. Wind speeds can reach 250 metres per second (900 km/h, or 560 mph).

According to de Longnez, the Hyperborean name for Uranus was “L’gy’hx”, the pronunciation of which word is obscure. The name “Uranus” took almost 70 years to reach general acceptance. British astronomer William Herschel, who is credited with the discovery of the planet despite it having been recorded as far back in time as 128 BC, wanted to name his discovery “Georgium Sidus” (“George’s Star”) after King George III, but this was not at all popular outside of Great Britain. For awhile it was even going to be called “Neptune” in commemoration of Britain’s naval supremacy. Finally, it was deemed appropriate that, just as Saturn had been named after Jupiter’s mythological father, so too should the new planet be named after Saturn’s father – Ouranos, the father of the Titans. A consensus was finally reached by 1850.

Uranus has two astronomical symbols. The first to be proposed, ♅,was suggested by French astronomer Jerome Lalande in 1784. In a letter to Herschel, Lalande described it as “un globe surmonté par la première lettre de votre nom” (suck). A later proposal, is a hybrid of the symbols for Mars and the Sun because Uranus was the Sky in Greek mythology, which was thought to be dominated by the combined powers of the Sun and Mars.

Uranus is called by a variety of translations in other languages. In Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, its name is literally translated as the “sky king star”. In Thai, its official name is “Dao Yurenat”, as in English. Its other name in Thai is “Dao Maritayu” (“Star of Mṛtyu”), after the Sanskrit word for death, “Mrtyu”. In Mongolian, its name is “Tengeriin Van”, translated as “King of the Sky”, reflecting its namesake god’s role as the ruler of the heavens. In Hawaiian, its name is “Hele’ekala”. In Maori, its name is "Wherangi". It is also named in Maori as “Rangipo”. In Nahuatl, Uranus is known as “Ilhuicateocitlalli”, named after the word for sky, “ilhuicatl”. It is also named in Nahuatl as “Xiuhteuccitlalli”, after the god Xiuhtecuhtli.

According to de Longnez, the planet is occupied by a peculiar, block-like species of creatures possessed of many legs and composed of some type of unknown metal. He tells us that they worship a strange creature called Lrogg, a two-headed batlike deity to whom they perform obeisance by undertaking ritual mutilations.

Of course one of our best sources of knowledge about the planet Uranus comes – surprisingly - from the operatic work “La Massa di Requiem per Shuggay”. The libretto of the opera tells the story of a star-spanning race of beings who flee their homeworld of “Shuggay” to arrive at L’gy’hx, where they begin to dominate the indigenes. Unfortunately, they begin to partake of the planet’s culture and this angers their deity, Baoht Z’uqqa-Mogg, who unleashes a cataclysm upon them. While encoded within the frippery of the operatic treatment, the story clearly depicts the actions of the world-hopping Shan and the retribution delivered upon them by Azathoth for deigning to convert to the unpleasant worship of Lrogg. It’s clear that de Longnez got his Shans and Mi-Go mixed up and merged them into a single narrative.

Italian; Benvenuto Chieti Brodighera; 1768; 1d3/1d6 Sanity loss; Cthulhu Mythos +4 percentiles; 2 weeks to study and comprehend

Spells: None; however, completing a full performance of the opera has the same result as casting the spell, Summon Azathoth

Again, the presence of sentient race upon a world invariably gives rise to a Dreamlands version of that planet and, as is the case with our world and Cykranosh, the “L’gy’hx Beyond the Wall of Sleep” has a unique feline race. The Cats from Uranus are composed of a hard chalk-like substance and have six legs; their tails are adorned with a vicious spike at the end. Each cat has a series of horn-like appendages radiating from their heads – these are able to generate a web of power that can detect many different types of energy – heat, light, radiation – from up to 40 kilometres (about 25 miles) distant.

Uranian cats have been known to travel to Earth’s Dreamlands but encounters are infrequent and the creatures’ intentions are rarely well-understood. Like other Dreamlands cats, they travel by leaping through space.