Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of innumerable small bodies thought to have orbited the sun during the formation of the planets.
from The Century Dictionary.
- Of or pertaining to a minute planet or planetary body.
- noun One of the minute bodies moving in planetary orbits, from time to time overtaking each other and coalescing, and so gradually building up the planets, according to the planetesimal hypothesis.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun astronomy Any of many small, solid
astronomical objects, that orbit astar and formprotoplanets through mutualgravitational attraction
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun one of many small solid celestial bodies thought to have existed at an early stage in the development of the solar system
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
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Examples
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The Murchison meteorite, as it is now known, is a fragment of a "planetesimal" or small, solid fragment that condensed out of the solar nebula as the solar system formed.
In the Primordial Soup Flannery, Tim 2000
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With all those Masonic symbols on its cover, I figured that CULTS, CONSPIRACIES AND SECRET SOCIETIES stood a small chance of being captured by THE LOST SYMBOL's commercial gravity, much as a tiny planetesimal can get pulled into a gas giant's orbit.
Boing Boing 2009
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A handful of components, scraping iron ore from a planetesimal.
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A handful of components, scraping iron ore from a planetesimal.
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A handful of components, scraping iron ore from a planetesimal.
Jason Stoddard, Strange and Happy » Blog Archive » Eternal Franchise, 26.1 of 31.1 2010
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A handful of components, scraping iron ore from a planetesimal.
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A handful of components, scraping iron ore from a planetesimal.
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A handful of components, scraping iron ore from a planetesimal.
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A handful of components, scraping iron ore from a planetesimal.
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Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin (1843-1928) was a respected and influential American geologist and science educator who supported the concepts of multiple glaciation and planetesimal origin of the Earth, and was among the first to emphasize carbon dioxide as a major regulator of Earth's temperature.
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