From volcanoes on Mars to scarps on Mercury – how places on other worlds get their names

The New Horizons spacecraft, which flew past Pluto in 2015, successfully completed a flyby of "Ultima Thule", an object in the Kuiper belt of bodies beyond Neptune on January 1, 2019. The name Ultima Thule, signifying a distant unknown place, is fitting but it is currently just a nickname pending formal naming. The official names of the body and of the features on its surface will eventually be allocated (this could take years) by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which celebrates its centenary in 2019.

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