Kurt, no need to revise your cosmology. I was thinking of planets orbiting "former fusors", such as neutron stars and black holes, or dead, black lumps of carbon that lacked sufficient mass to evolve into either. Seems I've read about an exoplanet detected orbiting a neutron star, perhaps I'm wrong. My memory isn't among my strong points- probably the biggest reason I never became a scientist. No recall. Admittedly I've been playing word games here, but my intent is to show the ridiculousness of requiring a home-grown pedigree or tidy orbit to qualify a body as a planet. It infers some kind of special status that isn't deserved. My original term was planetary chauvenism but perhaps a better term would be "solar chauvenism". Taken verbatim, some of these scientist's definitions would mean that only the sun has true planets. What they mean, and fail to articulate, is that they want to differentiate between the sun's ORIGINAL planets and late-comers. Defining a body as a planet (or not) doesn't decide where it formed- and I'm still in the dark as to why it gets so many scientists shorts in a knot... --- Canopus56 <canopus56@yahoo.com> wrote:
Assuming the in-situ accretion percentage makes or breaks a planet, what do you call those objects that look like planets, walk like planets, & quack like planets, but didn't form in the system you find them in or don't orbit a fusor at all? <snip>
Well, when professional astronomers _find_ any physical evidence of such an object - call me and I'll revise my cosmology. -:)
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