A team behind NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has unofficially named some craters of Charon after characters from Star Trek and Star Wars. New Horizons' flyby unveiled that Pluto as well as Charon are complex worlds having diverse surfaces. Therefore, there are many new features to be named.

To cite a few examples, Charon has a Vader Crater and impact features have been named after fellow Star Wars principals Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. One of the craters has been named after James T. Kirk, captain of the starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek series.

On the other hand, features on the Pluto have been named after real-life explorers. But the two large, dark features on the dwarf planet have been named after the Balrog, a kind of monster in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novels and Cthulhu, a god created by writer H. P. Lovecraft.

To cite few examples of the names on Pluto, its famous heart has been named after Clyde Tombaugh, an American astronomer who has discovered the dwarf planet in 1930. Many parts of Pluto have been named after pioneering space missions like NASA's Viking, Pioneer and Voyager efforts.

A big-sized icy plain present within Tombaugh Regio has been called Sputnik Planum. It was named after Soviet satellite whose launch is considered as the birth of the space age. Pluto's two known mountain ranges have been named after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, who were the first people ever to summit Mount Everest.