How to Use planetesimal in a Sentence
planetesimal
noun-
If this planetesimal was once Earth-like, as Manser believes, the outcome is bleak.
—Catherine Zuckerman, National Geographic, 4 Apr. 2019
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In order for the theory to work, planetesimals had to be huge, and this family was one of the biggest.
—Andrew Wagner, Science | AAAS, 3 Aug. 2017
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The largest of these planetesimals grow faster than the ones around them and swallow their neighbors to grow into proto-planets.
—Simon Lock, Scientific American Blog Network, 9 June 2017
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These are thought to be fragments of the cores of planetesimals that formed early in the Solar System's history.
—John Timmer, Ars Technica, 17 June 2017
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With such a short orbital period, the researchers expect the planetesimal to sit very near its host star.
—Jake Parks, Discover Magazine, 5 Apr. 2019
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Their first line of evidence that the space rock was a chunk of what was originally a large planetesimal came from the size of the diamonds themselves.
—Deborah Netburn, latimes.com, 17 Apr. 2018
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That much iron could be supplied if a large planetesimal (or small group of them) had migrated inward until the gravity of RW Aur A tore it apart.
—John Timmer, Ars Technica, 20 July 2018
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Enough grist to form a massive ring could have only been supplied billions of years ago, when the early solar system was chock full of planetesimals.
—Paul Voosen, Science | AAAS, 12 Dec. 2017
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Its uniform color, smooth surface and how the lobes came together help piece together a picture of how the planetesimal came to be.
—Ashley Strickland, CNN, 13 Feb. 2020
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Studying Arrokoth can shed light on how the building blocks of planets, called planetesimals, formed in our solar system.
—Ashley Strickland, CNN, 13 Feb. 2020
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The most massive objects in the disk are called planetesimals, and their locations are shaped by interactions with other planets in the system.
—Meredith A. MacGregor, Scientific American, 19 May 2020
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This merging occurred even as planetesimals were forming from dust.
—Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2016
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The belt might have come from parts of other planets that still exist, or be part of a planetesimal — which is like a baby planet — that never completely formed before being smashed apart.
—Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 28 Jan. 2021
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In the case of Mars, two different planetesimals with very different water content could have collided and never fully mixed, the researchers said.
—Ashley Strickland, CNN, 30 Mar. 2020
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The team categorizes the object as a planetesimal, because of its relatively small size.
—Catherine Zuckerman, National Geographic, 4 Apr. 2019
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The planets formed in a disk of gas and dust surrounding the sun where dust collided together to make pebbles, and then pebbles came together to make planetesimals hundreds of kilometers wide.
—Simon Lock, Scientific American Blog Network, 9 June 2017
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Specifically, the disks are seen around nearby young stars and contain gas, dust, and planetesimals which combine to form developing planets.
—Samantha Mathewson, Space.com, 12 Apr. 2018
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As the story goes, Mercury suffered a stupendous collision near the end of the period of planetary accretion, struck by a planetesimal so big that much of its crust was blasted into space.
—Kim Stanley Robinson, National Geographic, 22 Mar. 2019
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Except there seems to be a crucial bottleneck in this planetary assembly line: the jump from pebbles to kilometer-scale building blocks called planetesimals.
—Lee Billings, Scientific American, 20 Feb. 2020
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Dust grains grew into pebbles, and pebbles became world-building planetesimals.
—Nathaniel Scharping, Discover Magazine, 26 June 2017
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First discovered by Italian astronomer Annibale de Gasparis in 1852, the celestial body is suspected to be the core of a shattered planetesimal, a planet-forming building block.
—Elizabeth Gamillo, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 Jan. 2022
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Dwarf planets have been defined by the International Astronomical Union since 2006 as celestial bodies that are roundish like their larger cousins in the solar system, but which haven’t gobbled up all the other planetesimals near themselves.
—Alexis Madrigal, WIRED, 11 Nov. 2009
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The timing would be fortuitous, given the mounting detections of individual planetesimals outside of the Solar System.
—Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica, 14 Apr. 2020
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The new study's findings support previous theories that ‘Oumuamua may have originated as an icy planetesimal — a small object formed during the early stages of planet formation — similar to other solar system comets.
—Doyle Rice, USA TODAY, 22 Mar. 2023
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The planet formation process involves the coalescing of this material into larger and larger bodies, ultimately concluding in the production of planetesimals, bodies that range in size from large asteroids up to nearly the size of Mars and Mercury.
—John Timmer, Ars Technica, 20 July 2018
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At the same time, Jupiter may have hurled material inward as well, crashing hydrogen-rich asteroids and planetary embryos, or planetesimals, into crowded young terrestrial planets.
—Nola Taylor Redd, Smithsonian, 20 June 2018
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'planetesimal.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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