Printed rendition of a geocentric cosmological model from
Cosmographia, Antwerp, 1539
The idea of planets has evolved over its history, from the divine
wandering stars of antiquity to the earthly objects of the scientific age. The concept has expanded to include worlds not only in the Solar System, but in hundreds of other extrasolar systems. The ambiguities inherent in defining planets have led to much scientific controversy.
In ancient times, astronomers noted how certain lights moved across the sky in relation to the other stars. Ancient Greeks called these lights
πλάνητες ἀστέρες (
planetes asteres "wandering stars") or simply "
πλανήτοι" (
planētoi "wanderers"),
from which today's word "planet" was derived.
In ancient
Greece,
China,
Babylon and indeed all pre-modern civilisations,
it was almost universally believed that Earth was in the
center of the Universe and that all the "planets" circled the Earth. The reasons for this perception were that stars and planets appeared to revolve around the Earth each day,
and the apparently
common sense perception that the Earth was solid and stable, and that it is not moving but at rest.
The name for planets in
Chinese astronomy had the same motive as the Greek name,
行星 "moving star". In Japanese during the
Edo period there were two competing terms, 惑星 "
confused star" and 遊星 "
wandering star". In modern Japan, terminology was unified in favour of 惑星, but in science-fiction the alternative term 遊星 retains some currency.
Babylon
The first civilization known to possess a functional theory of the planets were the
Babylonians, who lived in
Mesopotamia in the first and second millennia BC. The oldest surviving planetary astronomical text is the Babylonian
Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, a 7th century BC copy of a list of observations of the motions of the planet Venus that probably dates as early as the second millennium BC.
The
Babylonian astrologers also laid the foundations of what would eventually become
Western astrology.
The
Enuma anu enlil, written during the
Neo-Assyrian period in the 7th century BC,
comprises a list of
omens and their relationships with various celestial phenomena including the motions of the planets.
The
Sumerians, predecessors of the Babylonians who are considered as one of the
first civilizations and are credited with the invention of
writing, had identified at least
Venus by 1500 BC.
Shortly afterwards, the other inner planet
Mercury and the outer planets
Mars,
Jupiter and
Saturn were all identified by
Babylonian astronomers. These would remain the only known planets until the invention of the
telescope in early modern times.
Greco-Roman astronomy
The term "planets" derives from the Greek
πλανήτης, meaning "wanderer", denoting objects whose position changed relative to the stars. Because they were not as interested in divination as the Babylonians, the Greeks initially did not attach as much significance to them. The
Pythagoreans, in the 6th and 5th centuries BC appear to have developed their own independent planetary theory, which consisted of the Earth, Sun, Moon, and planets revolving around a "Central Fire" at the center of the Universe.
Pythagoras or
Parmenides are said to have first identified the evening star and morning star (
Venus) as one and the same.
In the 3rd century BC,
Aristarchus of Samos proposed a
heliocentric system, according to which the Earth and planets revolved around the sun. However, the geocentric system would remain dominant until the
Scientific Revolution. The
Antikythera mechanism was an
analog computer designed to calculate the relative position of the Sun, Moon, and planets on a given date.
By the 1st century BC, during the
Hellenistic period, the Greeks had begun to develop their own mathematical schemes for predicting the positions of the planets. These schemes, which were based on geometry rather than the arithmetic of the Babylonians, would eventually eclipse the Babylonians' theories in complexity and comprehensiveness, and account for most of the astronomical movements observed from Earth with the naked eye. These theories would reach their fullest expression in the
Almagest written by
Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD. So complete was the domination of Ptolemy's model that it superseded all previous works on astronomy and remained the definitive astronomical text in the Western world for 13 centuries.
To the Greeks and Romans there were seven known planets, each presumed to be
circling the Earth according to the complex laws laid out by Ptolemy. They were, in increasing order from Earth (in Ptolemy's order): the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
India
In 499, the Indian astronomer
Aryabhata propounded a planetary model which explicitly incorporated the
Earth's rotation about its axis, which he explains as the cause of what appears to be an apparent westward motion of the stars. He also believed that the orbit of planets are
elliptical.
Ayrabhata's followers were particularly strong in
South India, where his principles of the diurnal rotation of the earth, among others, were followed and a number of secondary works were based on them.
In 1500,
Nilakantha Somayaji of the
Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics, in his
Tantrasangraha, revised Aryabhata's model.
In his
Aryabhatiyabhasya, a commentary on Aryabhata's
Aryabhatiya, he developed a planetary model where Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn orbit the Sun, which in turn orbits the Earth, similar to the
Tychonic system later proposed by
Tycho Brahe in the late 16th century. Most astronomers of the Kerala school who followed him accepted his planetary model.
Medieval Muslim astronomy
In the 11th century, the
transit of Venus was observed by
Avicenna, who established that
Venus was, at least sometimes, below the Sun.
In the 12th century,
Ibn Bajjah observed "two planets as black spots on the face of the Sun," which was later identified as the
transit of Mercury and Venus by the
Maragha astronomer
Qotb al-Din Shirazi in the 13th century.
European Renaissance
Renaissance planets
| Mercury | Venus | Earth | Mars | Jupiter | Saturn |
The five
classical planets, being visible to the naked eye, have been known since ancient times, and have had a significant impact on
mythology,
religious cosmology, and ancient
astronomy. As scientific knowledge progressed, however, understanding of the term "planet" changed from something that moved across the sky (in relation to the
star field); to a body that orbited the Earth (or that were believed to do so at the time); and in the 16th century to something that directly orbited the Sun when the
heliocentric model of
Copernicus,
Galileo and
Kepler gained sway.
Thus the Earth became included in the list of planets,
while the Sun and Moon were excluded. At first, when the first satellites of Jupiter and Saturn were discovered in the 17th century, the terms "planet" and "satellite" were used interchangeably – although the latter would gradually become more prevalent in the following century.
Until the mid-19th century, the number of "planets" rose rapidly since any newly discovered object directly orbiting the Sun was listed as a planet by the scientific community.
19th Century
Planets in early 19th century
| Mercury | Venus | Earth | Mars | Vesta | Juno | Ceres | Pallas | Jupiter | Saturn | Uranus |
In the 19th century astronomers began to realize that recently discovered bodies that had been classified as planets for almost half a century (such as
Ceres,
Pallas, and
Vesta) were very different from the traditional ones. These bodies shared the same region of space between Mars and Jupiter (the
Asteroid belt), and had a much smaller mass; as a result they were reclassified as "
asteroids." In the absence of any formal definition, a "planet" came to be understood as any "large" body that orbited the Sun. Since there was a dramatic size gap between the asteroids and the planets, and the spate of new discoveries seemed to have ended after the discovery of Neptune in 1846, there was no apparent need to have a formal definition.
20th Century
Planets from late 19th century to 1930
| Mercury | Venus | Earth | Mars | Jupiter | Saturn | Uranus | Neptune |
However, in the 20th century,
Pluto was discovered. After initial observations led to the belief it was larger than Earth,
the object was immediately accepted as the ninth planet. Further monitoring found the body was actually much smaller: in 1936,
Raymond Lyttleton suggested that Pluto may be an escaped satellite of
Neptune,
and
Fred Whipple suggested in 1964 that Pluto may be a comet.
However, as it was still larger than all known asteroids and seemingly did not exist within a larger population,
it kept its status until 2006.
Planets from 1930 to 2006
| Mercury | Venus | Earth | Mars | Jupiter | Saturn | Uranus | Neptune | Pluto |
In 1992, astronomers
Aleksander Wolszczan and
Dale Frail announced the discovery of planets around a
pulsar,
PSR B1257+12.
This discovery is generally considered to be the first definitive detection of a planetary system around another star. Then, on October 6, 1995,
Michel Mayor and
Didier Queloz of the
University of Geneva announced the first definitive detection of an exoplanet orbiting an ordinary
main-sequence star (
51 Pegasi).
The discovery of extrasolar planets led to another ambiguity in defining a planet; the point at which a planet becomes a star. Many known extrasolar planets are many times the mass of Jupiter, approaching that of stellar objects known as "
brown dwarfs".
Brown dwarfs are generally considered stars due to their ability to fuse
deuterium, a heavier isotope of
hydrogen. While stars more massive than 75 times that of Jupiter fuse hydrogen, stars of only 13 Jupiter masses can fuse deuterium. However, deuterium is quite rare, and most brown dwarfs would have ceased fusing deuterium long before their discovery, making them effectively indistinguishable from supermassive planets.
21st Century
Planets from 2006 to present
| Mercury | Venus | Earth | Mars | Jupiter | Saturn | Uranus | Neptune |
With the discovery during the latter half of the 20th century of more objects within the Solar System and large objects around other stars, disputes arose over what should constitute a planet. There was particular disagreement over whether an object should be considered a planet if it was part of a distinct population such as a
belt, or if it was large enough to generate energy by the
thermonuclear fusion of
deuterium.
A growing number of astronomers argued for Pluto to be declassified as a planet, since many similar objects approaching its size had been found in the same region of the Solar System (the
Kuiper belt) during the 1990s and early 2000s. Pluto was found to be just one small body in a population of thousands.
Some of them including
Quaoar,
Sedna, and
Eris were heralded in the popular press as the
tenth planet, failing however to receive widespread scientific recognition. The announcement of Eris in 2005, an object 27% more massive than Pluto, created the necessity and public desire for an official definition of a planet.
Acknowledging the problem, the IAU set about creating the
definition of planet, and produced one in August 2006. The number of planets dropped to the eight significantly larger bodies that had
cleared their orbit (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), and a new class of
dwarf planets was created, initially containing three objects (Ceres, Pluto and Eris).
In 2003, The
International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working Group on Extrasolar Planets made a position statement on the definition of a planet that incorporated the following working definition, mostly focused upon the boundary between planets and brown dwarves:
- Objects with true masses below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium (currently calculated to be 13 times the mass of Jupiter for objects with the same isotopic abundance as the Sun) that orbit stars or stellar remnants are "planets" (no matter how they formed). The minimum mass and size required for an extrasolar object to be considered a planet should be the same as that used in the Solar System.
- Substellar objects with true masses above the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium are "brown dwarfs", no matter how they formed or where they are located.
- Free-floating objects in young star clusters with masses below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium are not "planets", but are "sub-brown dwarfs" (or whatever name is most appropriate).
This definition has since been widely used by astronomers when publishing discoveries of exoplanets in
academic journals.
Although temporary, it remains an effective working definition until a more permanent one is formally adopted. However, it does not address the dispute over the lower mass limit,
and so it steered clear of the controversy regarding objects within the Solar System. This definition also makes no comment on the planetary status of objects orbiting brown dwarfs, such as
2M1207b.
One definition of a
sub-brown dwarf is a planet-mass object that formed through cloud-collapse rather than accretion. This formation distinction between a sub-brown dwarf and a planet is not universally agreed upon; astronomers are divided into two camps as whether to consider the formation process of a planet as part of its division in classification.
One reason for the dissent is that oftentimes it may not be possible to determine the formation process: for example an accretion-formed planet around a star may get ejected from the system to become free-floating, and likewise a cloud-collapse-formed sub-brown dwarf formed on its own in a star cluster may get captured into orbit around a star.
Dwarf planets from 2006 to present
| Ceres | Pluto | Makemake | Haumea | Eris |
The 13 Jupiter-mass cutoff is a rule of thumb rather than something of precise physical significance. The question arises: what is meant by
deuterium burning? This question arises because large objects will burn most of their deuterium and smaller ones will burn only a little, and the 13 MJ value is somewhere in between. The amount of deuterium burnt also depends not only on mass but on the composition of the planet, on the amount of
helium and
deuterium present.
Another criterion for separating planets and brown dwarfs, rather than deuterium burning, formation process or location is whether the core
pressure is dominated by coulomb pressure or electron degeneracy.
2006 definition
The matter of the lower limit was addressed during the 2006 meeting of the
IAU's General Assembly. After much debate and one failed proposal, the assembly voted to pass a resolution that
defined planets within the Solar System as:
A celestial body that is (a) in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
Under this definition, the Solar System is considered to have eight planets. Bodies which fulfill the first two conditions but not the third (such as Pluto, Makemake and Eris) are classified as
dwarf planets, provided they are not also
natural satellites of other planets. Originally an IAU committee had proposed a definition that would have included a much larger number of planets as it did not include (c) as a criterion.
After much discussion, it was decided via a vote that those bodies should instead be classified as dwarf planets.
This definition is based in theories of planetary formation, in which planetary embryos initially clear their orbital neighborhood of other smaller objects. As described by astronomer
Steven Soter:
The end product of secondary disk accretion is a small number of relatively large bodies (planets) in either non-intersecting or resonant orbits, which prevent collisions between them. Asteroids and comets, including KBOs [Kuiper belt objects], differ from planets in that they can collide with each other and with planets.
In the aftermath of the IAU's 2006 vote, there has been controversy and debate about the definition,
and many astronomers have stated that they will not use it.
Part of the dispute centres around the belief that point (c) (clearing its orbit) should not have been listed, and that those objects now categorised as dwarf planets should actually be part of a broader planetary definition.
Beyond the scientific community, Pluto has held a strong cultural significance for many in the general public considering its planetary status since its discovery in 1930. The discovery of Eris was widely reported in the
media as the
tenth planet and therefore the reclassification of all three objects as dwarf planets has attracted a lot of media and public attention as well.
Former classifications
The table below lists
Solar System bodies formerly considered to be planets:
| Body (current classification) | Notes |
| Star | Dwarf planet | Asteroid | Moon |
| Sun |
|
| The Moon | Classified as planets in antiquity, in accordance with the definition then used. |
|
|
| Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto | The four largest moons of Jupiter, known as the Galilean moons after their discoverer Galileo Galilei. He referred to them as the "Medicean Planets" in honor of his patron, the Medici family. |
|
|
| Titan, Iapetus, Rhea, Tethys, and Dione | Five of Saturn's larger moons, discovered by Christiaan Huygens and Giovanni Domenico Cassini. |
| Ceres | Pallas, Juno, and Vesta |
| The first known asteroids, from their discoveries between 1801 and 1807 until their reclassification as asteroids during the 1850s. Ceres has subsequently been classified as a dwarf planet in 2006.
|
|
| Astrea, Hebe, Iris, Flora, Metis, Hygeia, Parthenope, Victoria, Egeria, Irene, Eunomia |
| More asteroids, discovered between 1845 and 1851. The rapidly expanding list of planets prompted their reclassification as asteroids by astronomers, and this was widely accepted by 1854. |
| Pluto |
|
| The first known Trans-Neptunian object (i.e. minor planet with a semi-major axis beyond Neptune). In 2006, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. |
Illustration of the semi-major axis
