Acceptance of The Definition
Among the most vocal proponents of the IAU's decided definition are Mike Brown, the discoverer of Eris, and Steven Soter, professor of astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.
In an article in the January 2007 issue of Scientific American, Soter cited the definition's incorporation of current theories of the formation and evolution of the Solar System; that as the earliest protoplanets emerged from the swirling dust of the protoplanetary disc, some bodies "won" the initial competition for limited material and, as they grew, their increased gravity meant that they accumulated more material, and thus grew larger, eventually outstripping the other bodies in the Solar System by a very wide margin. The asteroid belt, disturbed by the gravitational tug of nearby Jupiter, and the Kuiper belt, too widely spaced for its constituent objects to collect together before the end of the initial formation period, both failed to win the accretion competition.
When the numbers for the winning objects are compared to those of the losers, the contrast is quite striking; if we accept Soter's concept that each planet occupies an "orbital zone," then the least orbitally dominant planet, Mars, is larger than all other collected material in its orbital zone by a factor of 5100. Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, only accounts for one third of the material in its orbit; Pluto's ratio is even lower, at around 7 percent. Mike Brown asserts that this massive difference in orbital dominance leaves "absolutely no room for doubt about which objects do and do not belong."
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