Having breakfast with her grandfather, Falconer Madan, the retired Libarian of the Bodleian, Venetia read about the newly discovered distant planet. Being fond of Greek and Roman myths, she thought Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld who could make himself invisible, would make the perfect name for the dark and remote frozen planet.

Impressed her grandfather got in touch with his friend Herbert Hall Turner, Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University, who sent a telegram to the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. The happy coincidence that the first two letters of Venitia’s proposed name, are also the initials of the observatory’s founder, Percival Lowell, who had predicted the existence of the planet, added to the appeal. On May 1 1930, the name was announced.

In 1987 the asteroid 6235 Burney was named in Venetia's honour, as was an instrument that headed to Pluto on the New Horizons spacecraft in 2006. It reached the planet in 2015 and geographic features could be mapped in detail for the first time. One of these features, a vast crater, was named after her in 2017. 

After Downe Venetia read Mathematics at Newnham College, Cambridge before becoming a chartered accountant. She married Maxwell Phair in 1947, a classicist who became housemaster and head of English at Epsom College. In the 1950s she switched from accountancy to teaching mathematics and economics, first at Gloucester House, Sutton and later at Wallington, Surrey. She retired in the 1980s, when she was able to continue her voluntary work with the Friends of Epsom Hospital.