Adam

In the next few hundreds of years there is small doubt that a virtually complete range of masses, sizes and species of exoplanets will be discovered and there is a call for some ’sensible’ physical properties to be considered when discriminating between all of the possible variations of planet that likely exist.

First and foremost, I think that the actual ‘planet’ term should itself be dumped in favour of some as yet uncoined alternative… it is just too entrenched in the public imagination to be fiddled around with, adding prefixes/suffixes or whatever !

Objects in the celestial realms would be far better described perhaps, with (maybe) mass/diameter as the primary concept in terms of naming non-stellar & non-brown-dwarf objects.

If mass were to be so used, then degrees in masses could be discriminators, yotta-objects, zetta-objects, peta-objects and so on for the SI units describing their masses in (Kg./tonnes).

Further discriminators which could co-describe objects might be their ’state’ (of matter) – solid/fluid; their state of hydrostatic equilibrium and so forth.

Nice and simple, easy and the names themselves would contain plenty of (user-redundant) information.

Its hardly rocket science (although; I suppose; its pretty darned close !)

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