What is a planet?

Abstract

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 a gap of four to five 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 disk evolution in a mature system to produce a small number of relatively large bodies (planets) in non-intersecting or resonant orbits, which prevent collisions between them.

22 pages, 3 tables, 4 figures, published in Astronomical Journal 132, 2513-1519 (2006)

References in corpus (19)

• The Size Distribution of Trans-Neptunian Bodies
• How Dry is the Brown Dwarf Desert?: Quantifying the Relative Number of Planets, Brown Dwarfs and Stellar Companions around Nearby Sun-like Stars
• A Population of very young Brown Dwarfs and free-floating Planets in Orion
• Final Stages of Planet Formation
• A Disk Census for Young Brown Dwarfs
• The Dynamics of Known Centaurs
• Giant Planet Migration through the Action of Disk Torques and Planet Scattering
• The Demographics of Long-Period Comets
• Young, Low-Mass Brown Dwarfs with Mid-Infrared Excesses
• Discovery of a Planetary-Mass Brown Dwarf with a Circumstellar Disk
• The Mass Ratio Distribution in Main-Sequence Spectroscopic Binaries Measured by IR Spectroscopy
• The orbits of the extrasolar planets HD 82943 c,b
• HD 137510: An Oasis in the Brown Dwarf Desert
• On the evolution of the resonant planetary system HD128311
• Multiple Companions to HD 154857 and HD 160691
• A Wide-Field CCD Survey for Centaurs and Kuiper Belt Objects
• Planetesimals To Brown Dwarfs: What is a Planet?
• Conditions of Dynamical Stability for the HD 160691 Planetary System
• Orbital solutions to the HD160691 (mu Arae) Doppler signal

Cited by in corpus (14)

• The Planet Nine Hypothesis
• STIS Coronagraphic Imaging of Fomalhaut: Main Belt Structure and the Orbit of Fomalhaut b
• Clouds in the Coldest Brown Dwarfs: FIRE Spectroscopy of Ross 458C
• What is a Galaxy? Cast your vote here...
• The Dawes Review 3: The Atmospheres of Extrasolar Planets and Brown Dwarfs
• Production of trans-Neptunian binaries through chaos-assisted capture
• Chronology and Sources of Lunar Impact Bombardment
• A Quantitative Criterion for Defining Planets
• Moons Are Planets: Scientific Usefulness Versus Cultural Teleology in the Taxonomy of Planetary Science
• Towards a Classification Scheme for the Rocky Planets based on Equilibrium Thermodynamic Considerations
• The Reclassification of Asteroids from Planets to Non-Planets
• Quantitative Criteria for Defining Planets
• Defining planets by a generating function
• The Cohesive Object Sequence: The Mass-Density Distribution of Astronomical Objects from Asteroids to Stars