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The timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their natural satellites charts the progress of the discovery of new bodies over history. Each object is listed in chronological order of its discovery (multiple dates occur when the moments of imaging, observation, and publication differ), identified through its various designations (including temporary and permanent schemes), and the ...
There are eight planets within the Solar System; planets outside of the solar system are also known as exoplanets. Artist's concept of the potentially habitable exoplanet Kepler-186f. As of 24 January 2025, there are 5,830 confirmed exoplanets in 4,354 planetary systems, with 976 systems having more than one planet. [1]
Proper names of planetary systems often follow common themes – for example, the planets of the star Copernicus are named after European astronomers. Proper names for planets outside of the Solar System – known as exoplanets – are chosen by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) through public naming contests known as NameExoWorlds.
Counting them among the planets became increasingly cumbersome. Eventually, they were dropped from the planet list (as first suggested by Alexander von Humboldt in the early 1850s) and Herschel's coinage, "asteroids", gradually came into common use. [139] Since then, the region they occupy between Mars and Jupiter is known as the asteroid belt.
From the total of 5,086 stars known to have exoplanets (as of January 26, 2024), there are a total of 1,033 known multiplanetary systems, [1] or stars with at least two confirmed planets, beyond the Solar System. This list includes systems with at least three confirmed planets or two confirmed planets where additional candidates have been proposed.
All but three features on Venus are named after female personages (goddesses and historical or mythological women). These three exceptions were named before the convention was adopted, being respectively Alpha Regio, Beta Regio, and Maxwell Montes which is named after James Clerk Maxwell.
First spotted in 2016, the disk around a star 1,000 light-years away was not confirmed to be a hotbed for new, emerging planets until recent obs Astronomers find the biggest known batch of planet ...
Pluto was, however, found to be too small to have disrupted the orbits of the outer planets, and its discovery was therefore coincidental. Like Ceres, it was initially considered to be a planet, but after the discovery of many other similarly sized objects in its vicinity it was reclassified in 2006 as a dwarf planet by the IAU. [22]