Subj : Re: Mothers Day
To   : boraxman
From : Adept
Date : Sun May 21 2023 05:36 pm

 bo> The only other differentiation which makes sense, that I can think of
 bo> straight away, is to differentiate between planets which are spherical
 bo> and those which aren't.  Rocky objects must reach a particular mass
 bo> before gravity is strong enough to force it into a sphere.

Yeah, that's the rule I'm good with, as it makes sense as a dividing line, because there aren't really weird exceptions. About as weird as it'd get is that something that's more solid would require a bit more mass than something that's looser.

 bo> As upset as I am (actually not all that much) about Pluto's demotion, it
 bo> makes sense to differentiate between planets which have regular circular
 bo> (or close to it) orbits, and other objects which don't.

That's not the difference, though -- planets can have terribly elliptical paths, even if Pluto doesn't. But there can't be other similarly-sized objects in the vicinity.

Which makes _some_ amount of sense, because, e.g., Jupiter winds up pulling in or tossing out anything in its vicinity.

But it certainly seems plausible that we'd find planets _somewhere_ that are Earth-sized, but in an asteroid-belt sort of situation.

But I guess we haven't, yet, so the definition could change again at that point.

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