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It very well could. Defining a planet as major or dwarf goes by its ability or inability to "clear the neighborhood", to control or remove objects of smaller m
by vikingerik 5y ago
It very well could. Defining a planet as major or dwarf goes by its ability or inability to "clear the neighborhood", to control or remove objects of smaller mass in its orbital area.
225 AU is a long way, and the volume of space to clear goes up quadratically with distance; this object would have 50,000 times more space to clear than does Earth. The orbital period also goes up with distance [edit, reply is right that it's the 3/2th power], so so does the time between interactions with any particular object.
Multiply those together and you would have an object more than cubically (3.5th power) less effective than Earth at clearing its neighborhood over time, such that it may not have happened in the lifetime of the solar system.
- lanna 5y ago> The orbital period also goes up quadratically with distance By Kepler's Third Law, isn't it proportional to the square root of the cube (3/2th power) of the distance?
- ithinkso 5y agoIt's on a plane. Circumference goes up lineary
- vikingerik 5y agoIt's undefined whether "clearing the neighborhood" involves the spheroid at that distance or just the plane. It hasn't come up, since all eight known major planets do satisfy the three-dimensional criterion. We'd probably revise or clarify the definition if we discovered an object that cleared its plane but not its volume.
- dylan604 5y ago>ability or inability to "clear the neighborhood", who said it has finished the job? has the correct paper work be filed? according to the permits in the galactic construction offices, the work is not scheduled for completion for a few hundred more millennia.