If this object did exist, wouldn't it be classified as a dwarf planet since, like Pluto, with a highly elliptical orbit it would be difficult to clear it of other Kuiper belt objects?
We’ve duck-typed the solar system, I guess.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_concept
Categorization is a leaky abstraction. Use them when they're useful, and ignore them when they become more trouble than they're worth.
The planets are different because they were first defined as mystical and cultural concepts, before they could be understood as scientific ones. There are plenty of people who still think about the planets as cultural concepts rather than scientific ones. (What is a Jupiter? It’s a thing in space that our culture has named “Jupiter.”) I think we should define the planets the way co-star does. By listing them:
DATA PLANET = MERCURY | MARS | ETC
Scientists can have their own definitions of things, but they will face resistance if they try to dictate culture through their definitions.
They're all simply human attempts to impose neat category boundaries across a continuum of natural phenomena that are definitely not neat.
Categories can be useful, but they often lead to pointless arguments by lay people (a la Pluto's relegation) when we start to fetishize a human-created category structure as an essential expression of underlying reality. It's just plain old human narcissism.
Pluto is a "planet" in the same way the sun is "not a star". If you tell someone to draw some stars you'll be confused if they just draw a few massive orbs of fire rather than some bright dots.
Before publishers discovered outrage bait as a way to sell ads, "actually Pluto is a dwarf planet not a planet" would have been an irrelevant nerdy factoid but now it's presented as a cultural issue everyone needs to have an opinion on.
So I propose just giving scientists migraines instead and discussing whether the sun and moon should be considered planets or stars.
The planets formed as cultural concepts in the sense that they were absolutely divorced from tangible experience other than in their role as mere “wandering stars,” allowing them to exist as pure symbolic archetypes. The idea of Mars bringing war has little to do with the fact that it and related objects have cleared their neighborhoods.
There’s a distinction here between the planets, which are the symbols that can be enumerated, and a planet, which is what the categorization problem for scientists involves.
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
Leaky abstractions can still be useful but you have to be aware that they're just abstractions and still understand that reality is messy and complicated or you'll end up legislating the value pi.
" definitely clears! "
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.
By Kepler's Third Law, isn't it proportional to the square root of the cube (3/2th power) of the distance?
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.
According the the wrong-headed AIU definition. So, yes, _Jupiter_ could be a dwarf planet, if it hasn't cleared it's orbital neighborhood for some reason.
Weird definition since it prevents deciding if an exoplanet is a planet or a dwarf planet.
It smells like a compromise proxy measure for: orbital stability, in a reasonably circular orbit, plus rule out Pluto.
Maybe there is some deep reason for using that measure, but it is not obvious.
Though there are a lot of people that present the IAU definition as if it were simply the will of "science," if you look at the 2006 debate about it amongst scientists, it was actually fairly contentious.
So no. It won't be a dwarf planet.