Comment by Aerolfos
21 hours ago
Actually, that is the IAU stance. And their definition for exoplanet includes small, non-rounded objects orbiting stars which would be asteroids (or comets or whatever) if they happened to be around the Sun.
All that debacle around dwarf planets to prepare for future observations, and yet the distinction ceases to apply the moment you go outside the Oort cloud...
But really, that's just the naming systems being bad, obviously common people don't think asteroids around other stars are "exoplanets" or should be called that way
I'm not talking about edge cases like asteroids or planetoids or dwarf planets. I'm talking about actual planets. Like a gas giant orbiting a star. It's obviously a planet even if it's not orbiting Sol.
It's perfectly coherent to argue that gas giants should count failed stars rather than as planets, given the boundary between them is under debate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WISE_0855%E2%88%920714
It's perfectly irrelevant to the thread.
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This is quite wrong.
https://www.iau.org/IAU/Science/What-we-do/Pluto-and-the-Dev...
"More generally, a planet:
a. orbits its host star, just as the Earth and Jupiter orbit the Sun,
b. is large enough to be mostly round, and
c. must have an important influence on the orbital stability of the other objects in its neighbourhood."
Exoplanets are planets by that definition where the host star is not our Sun:
"Researchers have found hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that reside outside our solar system. "