William Duncan MacMillan proposed in 1918 the classification of substellar objects into three categories based on their density and phase state: solid, transitional and dark (non-stellar) gaseous.8 Solid objects include Earth, smaller terrestrial planets and moons; with Uranus and Neptune (as well as later mini-Neptune and Super Earth planets) as transitional objects between solid and gaseous. Saturn, Jupiter and large gas giant planets are in a fully "gaseous" state.
A substellar object may be a companion of a star,9 such as an exoplanet or brown dwarf that is orbiting a star.10 Objects as low as 8–23 Jupiter masses have been called substellar companions.11
Objects orbiting a star are often called planets below 13 Jupiter masses and brown dwarves above that.12 Companions at that planet-brown dwarf borderline have been called Super-Jupiters, such as that around the star Kappa Andromedae.13 Nevertheless, objects as small as 8 Jupiter masses have been called brown dwarfs.14
§3, What Is a Planet?, Steven Soter, Astronomical Journal, 132, #6 (December 2006), pp. 2513–2519. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006AJ....132.2513S ↩
Chabrier and Baraffe, pp. 337–338 ↩
Alula Australis Archived 2006-08-24 at the Wayback Machine, Jim Kaler, in Stars, a collection of web pages. Accessed on line September 17, 2007. http://www.astro.uiuc.edu/~kaler/sow/alulaaus.html ↩
A search for substellar members in the Praesepe and σ Orionis clusters, B. M. González-García, M. R. Zapatero Osorio, V. J. S. Béjar, G. Bihain, D. Barrado Y Navascués, J. A. Caballero, and M. Morales-Calderón, Astronomy and Astrophysics 460, #3 (December 2006), pp. 799–810. http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006A%26A...460..799G ↩
Chabrier and Baraffe, §2.1.1, 3.1, Figure 3 ↩
Chabrier and Baraffe, §4.1, Figures 6–8 ↩
Hille, Karl (2018-01-11). "Hubble Finds Substellar Objects in the Orion Nebula". NASA. Retrieved 2018-01-30. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/hubble-finds-substellar-objects-in-the-orion-nebula ↩
MacMillan, W. D. (July 1918). "On stellar evolution". Astrophysical Journal. 48: 35–49. Bibcode:1918ApJ....48...35M. doi:10.1086/142412. /wiki/William_Duncan_MacMillan ↩
STScI-1995-48 http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1995/48/ ↩
Mugrauer, M., et al - Direct detection of a substellar companion to the young nearby star PZ Telescopii (2010) https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010A%26A...523L...1M/abstract ↩
S. Geier, et al - Discovery of a Close Substellar Companion to the Hot Subdwarf Star HD 149382 (2009) http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/702/1/L96/ ↩
Boss, A. P.; Basri, Gibor; Kumar, Shiv S.; Liebert, James; Martín, Eduardo L.; Reipurth, B.; "Nomenclature: Brown Dwarfs, Gas Giant Planets, and ?", in Brown Dwarfs, Proceedings of IAU Symposium #211, held 20–24 May 2002 at University of Hawaii, Honolulu http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2003IAUS..211..529B ↩
Astronomers Directly Image Massive Star's 'Super-Jupiter'11.19.12 https://www.nasa.gov/topics/universe/features/super-jupiter.html ↩
Discovery of a Planetary-Mass Brown Dwarf with a Circumstellar Disk, Luhman, et al., 2005 http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/635/1/L93/ ↩