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How does this affect Earth's status as a planet? The asteroid seems to be sharing our orbit, and the IAU has decided that if you haven't cleared your orbit you'
by avar 10y ago
How does this affect Earth's status as a planet? The asteroid seems to be sharing our orbit, and the IAU has decided that if you haven't cleared your orbit you're not a planet. That's how Pluto got disqualified.
Are we a dwarf planet now?
- DCKing 10y ago'Clearing your orbit' is not a qualitative term. It is actually something that is quantifiable: a value that expresses the relation of the mass in the planet's orbit compared to the mass of the planet itself. A tiny asteroid won't change that value much for Earth, which is more than comfortably a planet under this definition. The mass of this asteroid may not even affect the estimates of the mass of the regular space debris in our orbit even (haven't checked).
- avar 10y agoI didn't know that the "clearing your orbit" requirement had the caveat that it had to be cleared up to a given mass ratio. Do you know what that mass ratio is?
- kbutler 10y agoWikipedia includes the un-sourced qualifier "no other bodies of comparable size other than its satellites or those otherwise under its gravitational influence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood The "comparable size" is not part of the IAU definition, which just includes "(c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit." http://www.iau.org/news/pressreleases/detail/iau0603/ http://www.iau.org/news/pressreleases/detail/iau0603/