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.
Kepler-20
On December 20, 2011, the Kepler Space Telescope team reported the discovery of a five-planet system containing three small gas giants and the first two Earth-sized extrasolar planets, Kepler-20e (the first known extrasolar planet smaller than Earth orbiting a main-sequence star) and Kepler-20f, orbiting a Sun-like star. Although the planets are Earth-sized, they are not Earth-like in the respect that they are much closer to their star than Earth, and are hence not near the habitable zone, with expected surface temperatures of and , respectively. The three other Neptune-sized planets in the system, Kepler-20b, Kepler-20c, and Kepler-20d, all orbit similarly close to the star. Kepler-20g is a non-transiting exoplanet orbiting Kepler-20.