Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0608359

From: Steven Soter [view email]

Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2006 23:12:46 GMT (235kb)

What is a planet?

Authors: Steven Soter

Comments: 22 pages, 3 tables, 4 figures submitted to The Astronomical Journal

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. Both theoretical and observational measures of dynamical dominance reveal a gap of five orders of magnitude separating the eight planets of our solar system from the populations of asteroids and comets. This simple 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.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0608359