A vast crater on Pluto has been named after the 11-year-old English girl who suggested the Roman God when the planet was first discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930.

Venetia Burnley, who died in 2009, was having breakfast with her grandfather Falcon Madan, a retired librarian at the Bodleian in Oxford, when he read a newspaper report suggesting the frozen planet was still nameless.

Schoolgirl Venetia who was fascinated by mythology, told her grandfather that Pluto, the god of the underworld was a perfect fit such a dark, remote and frozen world.

The idea so impressed her grandfather that he mentioned it to Herbert Hall Turner, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University, who immediately sent a telegram to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, where Tombaugh agreed with the suggestion.