Asteroids and Planets

We learn in elementary school that planets orbit around the sun (or their nearest star, in the case of exoplanets), and moons revolve around a planet. But then there are asteroids, which also revolve around the sun like planets, but we didn't cover those much in elementary school because there are too many of them to learn. The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter has thousands of asteroids, which were once called small or minor planets. But are they really planets? That's a matter of semantics, and depends on how you define terms, which is very important in astronomy. A discovery in 1953 helped to determine the definition of a planet, sort of, but it took some time for all astronomers to come around to how these terms are used. Meanwhile, Minute Physics makes the difference between a planet and an asteroid clear and simple, although there are still some edge cases.