Under the ‘has cleared its orbital neighborhood’ and ‘fuses hydrogen into helium’ definitions, thanks to human activities Earth technically no longer qualifies as a planet but DOES count as a star.

https://explainxkcd.com/3063/

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    3 days ago

    For some reason this subject always hits a nerve, but I found this take pretty funny. Almost like when you experiment with regex matching randomly and find everything but what you really want to get.

    It also wouldn’t be a joke or topic if the definition had been clarified better than it was initially. They should have used the term “dynamical dominance”, implying whether or not a body is the primary object left in its orbital area after formation. And this has its own issues, as solar systems change over time.