Word.ws English Dictionary

ploonet

ploonet noun: a theoretical planetary body that formed as a moon orbiting a planet, but which has become tidally detached, so that it enters orbit about its star, separated from its parent planet.

Noun

ploonet (plural ploonets)

  1. (neologism) A theoretical planetary body that formed as a moon orbiting a planet, but which has become tidally detached, so that it enters orbit about its star, separated from its parent planet.
    • This paper explores the scenario where large regular exomoons escape after tidal interchange of angular momentum with its parent planet, becoming small planets by themselves. We name this hypothetical type of object a ploonet.2019, Mario Sucerquia, Jaime A Alvarado-Montes, Jorge I Zuluaga, Nicolás Cuello, Cristian Giuppone, “Ploonets: formation, evolution, and detectability of tidally detached exomoons”, in Monthly...
    • The researchers, who used simulations to explain the same, found that the simulated Ploonets were quite short-lived, crashing into the star or their parent planet in 0.5-1 million years.2020, Varsha M, “Ploonets: Runaway Moons”, in Waves, archived from the original on 06 Jun 2020, page 2

Forms of ploonet

pluralploonets

Origin of ploonet

Blend of planet + moon. Coined in 2019 by the research team of Mario Sucerquia, Jaime A Alvarado-Montes, Jorge I Zuluaga, Nicolás Cuello, Cristian Giuppone (see quotations below).

Questions about ploonet

What does ploonet mean?
Ploonet means a theoretical planetary body that formed as a moon orbiting a planet, but which has become tidally detached, so that it enters orbit about its star, separated from its parent planet.
What part of speech is ploonet?
Ploonet is a noun.
What is the plural of ploonet?
The plural of ploonet is ploonets.

Words near ploonet in the dictionary

  1. Plonski
  2. Plonskis
  3. Ploof
  4. Ploofs
  5. plooky
  6. ploonet
  7. ploonets
  8. ploong
  9. ploop
  10. ploops
  11. ploot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ploonet (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “ploonet.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ploonet. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.