• DOI:10.1086/508861
Corpus ID: 14676169

What is a planet?

@article{Soter2007WhatIA,
  title={What is a planet?},
  author={S. Soter},
  journal={Scientific American},
  year={2007},
  volume={296 1},
  pages={
          34-41
        }
}

• S. Soter
• Published 2007
• Physics, Medicine
• Scientific American

A planet is an end product of disk accretion around a primary star or substar. I quantify this definition by the degree to which a body dominates the other masses that share its orbital zone. Theoretical and observational measures of dynamical dominance reveal gaps of 4-5 orders of magnitude separating the eight planets of our solar system from the populations of asteroids and comets. The proposed definition dispenses with upper and lower mass limits for a planet. It reflects the tendency of… Expand