Astronomers often call asteroids "minor planets," and call the larger planetary bodies (those which are popularly called planets) "major planets."

Planets within Earth's solar system can be divided into categories according to composition.

• Terrestrial or rocky: Planets that are similar to Earth—with bodies largely composed of rock
• Jovian or gas giant: Those with a composition largely made up of gaseous material, as with Jupiter
• Icy: Sometimes a third category is added to include bodies like Pluto, whose composition is primarily ice; this category of "icy" bodies also includes many non-planetary bodies such as the icy moonss of the outer planets of our solar system (e.g. Titan).

• Mercury
• Venus
• Earth—with its Moon, sometimes considered a "double planet."
• Mars
• Jupiter
• Saturn
• Uranus
• Neptune
• Pluto—with its moon Charon sometimes considered a double planet, and also sometimes not considered a planet at all, but simply the largest of the Trans-Neptunian objects in the Kuiper belt.

Several hypothetical planets, like Planet X (supposedly beyond the orbit of Pluto) or Vulcan (thought to orbit inside the orbit of Mercury), were posited, and were subjects of intense searches that found nothing.

Almost all extrasolar planets (those outside our solar system) discovered to date have masses which are about the same or larger than the gas giants within the solar system. (The only exception is three planets discovered orbiting a burned-out star, or supernova remnant, called a pulsar. These are comparable in size to the terrestrial planets). This is largely because the gravitational effect of massive planets is larger, making them easier to detect. However, it is far from clear if the newly discovered planets would resemble gas giants in our solar system or if they are of an entirely different type or types which are unknown in our solar system. In particular, some of the newly discovered planets orbit extremely closely to their parent star sometimes in highly elliptical orbits. They therefore receive much more stellar radiation than the gas giants in our solar system, which makes it questionable whether they are the same type of planet at all.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States has a program underway to develop a Terrestrial Planet Finder artificial satellite, which would be capable of detecting the planets with masses comparable to terrestrial planets. The frequency of occurrence of these planets is one of the variables in the Drake equation which estimates the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Planets are thought to form from the collapsing nebula that a planet's star formed out of, aggregating from gas and dust that orbits the protostar in a dense protostellar disk before the star's core ignites and its solar wind blows the remaining material away.

See Also

• Prograde and retrograde motion
• Planets in science fiction

• Planetary Motions
• NASA Planet Quest