(Re)-Defining Planets — the Fundamental Plane of Planets

6000+ exoplanets are now detected using various techniques, with estimates of billions of planets existing in our Galaxy alone.

They are called super-Earths, hot Earths, mini-Neptunes, hot Neptunes, sub-Neptunes, Saturns, Jupiters, hot Jupiters, gas giants, ice giants, rocky, terran, subterran, superterran, and so on. This prompted the emergence of many recent works on taxonomy, or classification, of exoplanets. However, there is still no basic, fundamental definition of ‘What is a planet?’.

IAU has forwarded a definition in 2006 which, however, raised more questions than it solved. The first ambitious task here is to establish if there are limits on the size/mass of planets. The lower mass limit may be assumed as of Mimas – approximately minimum mass required to attain a nearly spherical hydrostatic equilibrium shape. The upper mass limit may be easier – there is a natural lower limit to what constitutes a star: ~0.08 SU.

But then there are brown dwarfs: IAU has defined brown dwarfs as objects that exceed the deuterium burning limit (~13 JU), and giant exoplanets generally have masses of ~0.3 to ~60 JU. The resolution requires assembling the basic physical parameters that define planets quantitatively.

Mass and radius are the two fundamental properties, and we propose to use a third correlated parameter: the moment of inertia. Based on this, we create the fundamental planet plane where the two parameters are correlated with the third, similar to a fundamental galactic plane. The fundamental planetary plane with turn-off point diagrams is constructed for the first time in this work.

We define a planet as ‘A celestial spherical object, bound to a star or unbound, that lies on the fundamental planetary plane, within a mass range between 0.02 EU to 13 JU’.

Madhu Kashyap Jagadeesh, Arkil D. Parikh, Margarita Safonova, Bernard Foing

Comments: 8 pages, 7 figures Submitted to MNRAS
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2506.16063 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2506.16063v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.16063
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Submission history
From: Arkil Dhaval Parikh
[v1] Thu, 19 Jun 2025 06:42:00 UTC (274 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16063

Astrobiology,