If you were at SPAC with Def Leppard, Styx and Tesla then you may have heard about Pluto's moon being named after Styx. 

I'm sure you know they were goofing around but Pluto's smallest moon is named Styx. They did just tour Horizons’ Mission Control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland.

According to the Denver Post:

New Horizons mission principal investigator Alan Stern, from Boulder’s Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), set the record straight.

“When Pluto’s moon was named, it was for the river Styx, but no kidding, we really had you guys in mind too,” Stern told band members Tommy Shaw, Lawrence Gowan and Todd Sucherman.

Styx is actually the mythological river that separates the world of the living from the realm of the dead.

NASA.gov reports Dr. Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute, who discovered Pluto’s Styx in 2012, was “over the moon” to meet the rock and roll version of Styx, noting he’s a longtime fan of the band.

The band Styx chose its name in 1972, exactly four decades before Pluto’s fifth moon was spotted. The name refers to the river in Greek mythology between Earth and the Underworld.

Styx the moon – previously known as simply P5 – was christened by the International Astronomical Union, to the disappointment of Star Trek fans, who had campaigned for “Vulcan,” shared by the Roman god for volcanoes.

NASA/Getty Images
NASA/Getty Images
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