I say if it’s naturally spherical and orbits a star, it’s a planet.
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That was mine too, but as a sci-fi reader, I’ll go a bit farther.
- Cloud - a mostly-coherent glob of gases significantly more dense than surrounding space; may take any form - spherical, toroid, or amorphous
- Pond - a glob of mostly-liquid, which may contain rocks, plants, animals, etc., but is predominantly cohesive liquid; may take any form - spherical, toroid, or less-commonly, amorphous
- Planetoid - a chunk of predominantly solid stuff; may have liquid and an atmosphere, but the dominant feature is solid-ish, whether rock, ice, etc. This includes asteroids, comets, planets, etc.
- Planet - a primarily spherical planetoid that orbits a star
- Planetar - a planetoid that would be considered a planet, but is in interstellar space not orbiting a star
- Comet - a planetoid whose orbit causes it to trail a tail of mass
- Asteroid - a planetoid that doesn’t fit one of the other definitions
- Ring - a group of planetoids orbiting another planetoid or star in a ring/disc form
- Shell - a group of planetoids orbiting another planetoid or star in a spherical form
- Cluster - a somewhat cohesive group of planetoids that travel together, but do not form a ring or shell
Then things get weird with jets, flares or storms, brown dwarves, white dwarves, black dwarves, neutron stars and pulsars, black holes, nebulas, and constructs such as probes, ships, stations, ringworlds, dyson spheres, etc.
May as well keep the definition of planet simple. There’s plenty more than just planets to consider.
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I am OK with extending the number of planet-like categories, if it will help scientists understand the differences, and encourage people to learn more about science.
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Paywalled. Is it on arxiv?
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I had no problem viewing it in an Chrome incognito window.
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they say in the article that it’s “not related to climate change,” but how can they definitively say that, since this is a record-breaking strike in a time when all sorts of weather-related things are increasing to staggering levels? seems questionable to me.
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Where the scale might indicate climate embiggening, it might also be a new instrument or more coverage.
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I’ve always liked that drum solo. This came out in 1963, when I was a kid living in Hawaii – a little before I got into rock & roll.
That is one amazing video of the fusion reaction, BTW. I wonder if it cut off when the camera melted.
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paywalled, but this seems to be the principal author’s earlier paper covering the same topic.
Estimating the Loss of Medieval Literature with an Unseen Species Model from Ecodiversity
The century-long loss of documents is one of the major impediments to the study of historic literature. Here we focus on Middle Dutch chivalric epics (ca. 1200-1450), a genre for which little archival records exist that shed light on the survival rates of works and documents. We cast the quantitative estimation of these survival rates as a variant of the unseen species problem from ecodiversity. We apply an established non-parametric method (Chao1) and compare it to a number of common alternatives on simulated data. Finally, we discuss the implications of our results for conventional philology: our numbers suggest that the losses sustained on the level of works may be more dramatic than previously imagined, whereas those at the document-level align surprisingly well with existing estimates in book history, although these were based on completely different data sources.
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Reminds me of one of the many ‘slides’ shown when getting eyes tested.
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(waits for tv-movie to come out)
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The concept of altered mosquitos came up in Mira Grant’s (Seanan McGuire) Newsflesh trilogy, which I read last week… so as much as I like science, this idea makes me just a little uneasy, even though I know it’s illogical.
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