Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
In the classic fantasy novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, it takes Dorothy Gale just a few clicks of her heels to get from the Land of Oz all the way back to her home in Kansas.
If Dorothy wanted to visit the crater that has been newly named after her, though, she’d have to travel a bit longer. On its closest day, Dorothy Crater is located over 2.6 billion miles away from Earth, on the surface of Charon, one of Pluto’s moons.It’s one of a dozen features of Charon’s surface recently granted official names by the International Astronomical Union’s Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature. The features, which include craters, canyons, and mountains, were first spotted by the New Horizons space probe, which flew by Pluto and its moons in 2015.
In 2017, the New Horizons team began accepting name suggestions for Charon’s landscape under a…
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