Dwarf planet
With the discovery of Pluto in 1930, most astronomers considered the Solar System to have nine planets, along with thousands of significantly smaller bodies (asteroids and comets). For almost 50 years Pluto was thought to be larger than Mercury, but with the discovery in 1978 of Pluto's moon Charon, it became possible to measure Pluto's mass accurately and to determine that it was much smaller than initial estimates. It was roughly one-twentieth the mass of Mercury, which made Pluto by far the smallest planet. Although it was still more than ten times as massive as the largest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres, it had one-fifth the mass of Earth's Moon. Furthermore, having some unusual characteristics, such as large orbital eccentricity and a high orbital inclination, it became evident that it was a different kind of body from any of the other planets.
List of possible dwarf planets
After Brown and Tancredi made their calculations, it was discovered that Iapetus (1,470 km in diameter) and the smaller moons of Saturn down to Mimas with well-determined shapes are not in hydrostatic equilibrium as had been thought. They have a hydrostatic shape that froze in some time ago and that does not match the shape an equilibrium body would have at their current rotation rates. Ceres, at 950 km, is the smallest body for which detailed measurements are consistent with hydrostatic equilibrium. It is not clear whether trans-Neptunian objects would behave more like Ceres or Iapetus; thus, some or all trans-Neptunian dwarf planets smaller than Pluto and Eris might not actually be in equilibrium. The IAU has not addressed the issue since these findings.