Reference Terms
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Planet
The International Astronomical Union defines "planet" as a celestial body that, within the Solar System that is in orbit around the Sun; has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape; and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit; or within another system, it is in orbit around a star or stellar remnants; has a mass below the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium; and is above the minimum mass/size requirement for planetary status in the Solar System.
Note: The above text is excerpted from the Wikipedia article "Planet", which has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Related Stories
1
2
Space & Time News
December 20, 2024
Dec. 20, 2024 — One of the biggest mysteries in science -- dark energy -- doesn't actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the Universe is expanding. For the past 100 years, physicists have generally assumed that the cosmos is ...
Dec. 19, 2024 — A new study explores how variations in Mars' crustal thickness during its ancient history may have influenced the planet's magmatic evolution and hydrological systems. The research suggests that the ...
Dec. 13, 2024 — The galaxy M87, located in the Virgo constellation, provided the first-ever photo of a black hole in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope captured an image of the supermassive black hole at the ...
Dec. 12, 2024 — Stars similar to the Sun produce a gigantic outburst of radiation on average about once every hundred years per star. Such superflares release more energy than a trillion hydrogen bombs and make all previously recorded solar flares pale in ...
Latest Headlines
updated 12:56 pm ET
Dec. 20, 2024 — Scientists have delivered the first measurements of Greenland Ice Sheet thickness change using data from ESA and NASA ice satellite missions. With ...
Dec. 20, 2024 — A study introduces a novel thermodynamic concept called the 'centotectic' and investigates the stability of liquids in extreme conditions -- critical information for determining the habitability of ...
Dec. 19, 2024 — Scientist have begun to reveal the particle-level processes that create the type of auroras that dance rapidly across the sky. The Kinetic-scale Energy and momentum Transport experiment -- KiNET-X -- ...
Dec. 19, 2024 — Researchers have found evidence of magnetic fields associated with a disc of gas and dust a few hundred light-years across deep inside a system of two merging galaxies known as Arp220. They say these ...
Dec. 19, 2024 — Scientists are changing our understanding of climate and weather on Mars and providing critical insights into Earth's atmospheric processes as ...
Dec. 19, 2024 — A brotherly research duo has discovered that when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produces top quarks -- the heaviest known fundamental particles -- it regularly creates a property known as ...
Dec. 19, 2024 — New studies offer a clearer picture of how the outer solar system formed and evolved based on analyses of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) and centaurs. The findings reveal the distribution of ices in ...
Dec. 18, 2024 — Scientists recently led a team that found, for the first time, that Chiron has surface chemistry unlike other centaurs. Its surface it has both ...
Dec. 19, 2024 — Scientists have unveiled groundbreaking research on the origins of lunar water, offering insights that could reshape our understanding of the Earth-Moon system and the broader solar system. The ...
Dec. 18, 2024 — Conventional wisdom assumes the ratio of gases in a planet's atmosphere should match the ratio of gases in the natal disk that birthed it. For the first time, researchers compared gases in a ...