MMP96

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, astronomy developed further in India and the medieval Islamic
world.
In 499 CE, the Indian astronomer Aryabhata propounded a planetary model that explicitly incorporated Earth's ro-
tation about its axis, which he explains as the cause of what appears to be an apparent westward motion of the
stars. He also theorised that the orbits of planets were elliptical.[176] Aryabhata's followers were particularly strong
in South India, where his principles of the diurnal rotation of Earth, among others, were followed and a number of
secondary works were based on them.[177]
The astronomy of the Islamic Golden Age mostly took place in the Middle East, Central Asia, Al-Andalus,
and North Africa, and later in the Far East and India. These astronomers, like the polymath Ibn al-Haytham, gener-
ally accepted geocentrism, although they did dispute Ptolemy's system of epicycles and sought alternatives. The
10th-century astronomer Abu Sa'id al-Sijzi accepted that the Earth rotates around its axis.[178] In the 11th century,
the transit of Venus was observed by Avicenna.[179] His contemporary Al-Biruni devised a method of determining the
Earth's radius using trigonometry that, unlike the older method of Eratosthenes, only required observations at a
single mountain.[180]
Scientific Revolution and discovery of outer planets

See also: Heliocentrism
True-scale Solar System poster made by Emanuel Bowen in

1747. At that time, Uranus, Neptune, and the asteroid belts had all not yet been discovered.
With the advent of the Scientific Revolution and the heliocentric model of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, use of
the term "planet" changed from something that moved around the sky relative to the fixed star to a body that or-
bited the Sun, directly (a primary planet) or indirectly (a secondary or satellite planet). Thus the Earth was added to
the roster of planets,[181] and the Sun was removed. The Copernican count of primary planets stood until 1781,
when William Herschel discovered Uranus.[182]
When four satellites of Jupiter (the Galilean moons) and five of Saturn were discovered in the 17th century, they
joined Earth's Moon in the category of "satellite planets" or "secondary planets" orbiting the primary planets,
though in the following decades they would come to be called simply "satellites" for short. Scientists generally con-
sidered planetary satellites to also be planets until about the 1920s, although this usage was not common among
non-scientists.[154]
In the first decade of the 19th century, four new 'planets' were discovered: Ceres (in 1801), Pallas (in
1802), Juno (in 1804), and Vesta (in 1807). It soon became apparent that they were rather different from previ-
ously known planets: they shared the same general region of space, between Mars and Jupiter (the asteroid belt),
with sometimes overlapping orbits. This was an area where only one planet had been expected, and they were
much smaller than all other planets; indeed, it was suspected that they might be shards of a larger planet that had
broken up. Herschel called them asteroids (from the Greek for "starlike") because even in the largest telescopes
they resembled stars, without a resolvable disk.[153][183]
The situation was stable for four decades, but in the 1840s several additional asteroids were discovered (As-
traea in 1845; Hebe, Iris, and Flora in 1847; Metis in 1848; and Hygiea in 1849). New "planets" were discovered
every year; as a result, astronomers began tabulating the asteroids (minor planets) separately from the major plan-
ets and assigning them numbers instead of abstract planetary symbols,[153] although they continued to be consid-
ered as small planets.[184]
Neptune was discovered in 1846, its position having been predicted thanks to its gravitational influence upon
Uranus. Because the orbit of Mercury appeared to be affected in a similar way, it was believed in the late 19th cen-
tury that there might be another planet even closer to the Sun. However, the discrepancy between Mercury's orbit
and the predictions of Newtonian gravity was instead explained by an improved theory of gravity, Einstein's gen-
eral relativity.[185][186]
Pluto was discovered in 1930. After initial observations led to the belief that it was larger than Earth, [187] the object
was immediately accepted as the ninth major planet. Further monitoring found the body was actually much
smaller: in 1936, Ray Lyttleton suggested that Pluto may be an escaped satellite of Neptune,[188] and Fred Whip-
ple suggested in 1964 that Pluto may be a comet.[189] The discovery of its large moon Charon in 1978 showed that
Pluto was only 0.2% the mass of Earth.[190] As this was still substantially more massive than any known asteroid,
and because no other trans-Neptunian objects had been discovered at that time, Pluto kept its planetary status,
only officially losing it in 2006.[191][192]
In the 1950s, Gerard Kuiper published papers on the origin of the asteroids. He recognised that asteroids were
typically not spherical, as had previously been thought, and that the asteroid families were remnants of collisions.
Thus he differentiated between the largest asteroids as "true planets" versus the smaller ones as collisional frag-
ments. From the 1960s onwards, the term "minor planet" was mostly displaced by the term "asteroid", and refer-
ences to the asteroids as planets in the literature became scarce, except for the geologically evolved largest three:
Ceres, and less often Pallas and Vesta.[184]
The beginning of Solar System exploration by space probes in the 1960s spurred a renewed interest in planetary
science. A split in definitions regarding satellites occurred around then: planetary scientists began to reconsider
the large moons as also being planets, but astronomers who were not planetary scientists generally did not.
[154]
(This is not exactly the same as the definition used in the previous century, which classed all satellites as sec-
ondary planets, even non-round ones like Saturn's Hyperion or Mars's Phobos and Deimos.)[193][194] All the eight ma-
jor planets and their planetary-mass moons have since been explored by spacecraft, as have many asteroids and
the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto; however, so far the only planetary-mass body beyond Earth that has been ex-
plored by humans is the Moon.[b]
Defining the term planet

Further information: Definition of planet
A growing number of astronomers argued for Pluto to be declassified as a planet, because 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. [195] They often referred to the
demotion of the asteroids as a precedent, although that had been done based on their geophysical differences
from planets rather than their being in a belt.[154] Some of the larger trans-Neptunian objects, such
as Quaoar, Sedna, Eris, and Haumea,[196] were heralded in the popular press as the tenth planet.
The announcement of Eris in 2005, an object 27% more massive than Pluto, created the impetus for an official
definition of a planet,[195] as considering Pluto a planet would logically have demanded that Eris be considered a
planet as well. Since different procedures were in place for naming planets versus non-planets, this created an ur-
gent situation because under the rules Eris could not be named without defining what a planet was. [154] At the time,
it was also thought that the size required for a trans-Neptunian object to become round was about the same as
that required for the moons of the giant planets (about 400 km diameter), a figure that would have suggested
about 200 round objects in the Kuiper belt and thousands more beyond.[197][198] Many astronomers argued that the
public would not accept a definition creating a large number of planets.[154]
The International Astronomical Union's

definition of a planet in the Solar System
1. Object is in orbit around the Sun

2. Object has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly
round) shape
3. Object has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit
Source:"IAU 2006 General Assembly: Resolutions 5 and 6" (PDF). IAU. 24 August 2006. Retrieved 23 June 2009.
To acknowledge the problem, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) set about creating the definition of
planet and produced one in August 2006. Under this definition, the Solar System is considered to have eight plan-
ets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). Bodies that fulfill the first two conditions
but not the third are classified as dwarf planets, provided they are not natural satellites

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After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, astronomy developed further in India and the medieval Islamic

Scientific Revolution and discovery of outer planets

True-scale Solar System poster made by Emanuel Bowen in

Defining the term planet

The International Astronomical Union's

1. Object is in orbit around the Sun

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