The first planets outside the Solar System, exoplanets, were discovered in the late 1990s.

One of the first was found around the star 51 Pegasi, and so was named for a character in mythology associated with Pegasus, Bellerephon. The International Astronomical Union (iau.org) which handles and approves all celestial naming decided that such names were unacceptable because they anticipated the discovery of millions, if not billions of such planets. In October 2012 the first planet was found in the Alpha Centauri system, which has three stars. One of these stars is very similar to the Sun, one is a bit smaller and cooler, and the third is a small, cool star called a red dwarf. The planet orbits only 3 million miles from the second star, so although it is very near the size of Earth, the temperature on the surface must be around 2150F. The star is called Alpha Centauri B. Under the IAU rules the star is now Alpha Centauri Ba, and the planet Alpha Centauri Bb. This system is unlikely to ever be popular, especially in systems like Castor (a star in Gemini), which is a combination of six stars. Thus one could have planets around Castor E, giving us Castor Ed, or other odd, embarassing or even obscene combinations. Yet there is little chance of the IAU making any changes any time soon. Science Fiction writers have invented names for fictional planets in their stories. Isaac Asimov famously has a galactic empire ruled from a planet called Trantor (a name he told me he adapted from an elephant in a children's story). Other authors have taken names out of Earth's remote history, such as Argos. If we ever do manage to colonize planets outside the Solar System I suspect all these types of sources will be used for naming. The IAU's small body naming commission is the most active of its bodies dealing with names, having covered names for about twenty thousand asteroids. In the 19th Century astronomy ran through Greek and Roman mythology for asteroids, but by the early Twentieth Century few such names were still unused, and asteroids began to be named for astronomers and other scientists. By the middle of the century all sorts of people began to get asteroids named for them, such as Ann Frank. With her as a precedent, there is a current campaign to have an asteroid named for Malala, the teenage Pakistani girl the Taliban tried to assassinate. Only about five hundred stars have recognized names. (Purchased names are vigorously denied by the IAU.) It seems likely that no exoplanets will get names better than a letter after the star's designation any time soon.