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by rantallion 393 days ago
> What’s a “moon” versus a “planet”? Earth is a moon of Sol, is it not?

Planets orbit stars. Moons orbit planets. That's a clear and easy distinction. Planet vs dwarf planet isn't so clear to most.

2 comments

What’s a moon that orbits a moon? Doesn’t that make the orbited moon a planet? Pluto has moons. But it’s not a planet? ???

If a super massive planet and two stars orbit each other in the center of a star system, all the planets that orbit those stars are moons then technically, right?

This is all super fuzzy and completely arbitrary. These concepts are constructs. Humans could make them better. Instead, everyone decided to make it all worse.

No. A star is not a planet. The bodies orbiting the stars are planets, or dwarf planets, asteroids or comets. Bodies orbiting them are moons. Bodies orbiting the moons don't have a name.
> Bodies orbiting the moons don't have a name.

Satellites? Natural or manmade, small or big, doesn't matter.

A natural moon of a moon is called a subsatellite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsatellite

At present, purely theoretical: we don’t know of any. They are probably quite rare, but we don’t really know - maybe, in centuries to come, we’ll know of dozens of examples; maybe, there are none to find in this entire galaxy

Don't forgot about moonlets!
Don't planets and moons both orbit their center of mass? The distinction only seems to make sense if the masses of the two bodies are far apart. If they have similar mass, which is the moon and which the planet?
Indeed, before the planet/dwarf planet debate, Pluto and Charon were sometimes called a “binary planet” because their center of rotation is outside the volume of either body.