Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Wilson
How does that not define planets around other stars?
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The part about "clearing its path" was added only to prevent our solar system planet tally from reaching into the dozens. It's not applicable to other systems for many reasons. For one, we have no way of knowing whether extrasolar objects have cleared their region or not. Furthermore, it's not based on size...so a Ceres-sized object that has cleared its orbit would be a planet but a region of Earth-sized objects would remain dwarf planets. Such scenarios, which are very feasible, really make the definition useless. Location should not matter at all.