I Why is Mars not considered a "full-fledged" planet?

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Mars is classified as a planet, but it is often referred to as a "planetary embryo" due to its small size and relatively thin atmosphere compared to Earth and Venus. It is believed that Mars did not undergo the significant impacts that contributed to the growth of other planets, which is why it remains smaller and less developed. This lack of major collisions may have prevented Mars from achieving full planetary status, as it did not experience the final stages of planetary formation. Additionally, Mars lacks a substantial magnetic field, which contributes to atmospheric loss from solar wind. Despite these factors, Mars retains its classification as a planet within the solar system.
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Hi, @swampwiz!
Mars is definitely considered to be a planet (and so are Mercury, Jupiter etc.)
But Mars has a comparatively thin atmosphere, and maybe that's why the author wrote like he/she did, I don't know.
 
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It is a full fledged plant like any of the other 7
 
Fledge relates etymologically to 'fliegen', flight, metonymically to birds' maturation of feathers sufficient for flying ##-## perhaps that is what the writer of the paper had in mind when he thought of saying that Mars is not full-fledged ##-## although it is properly the birds that are or are not full-fledged, and not the planet or its atmosphere, it seems clear that the atmosphere of Mars is not dense enough to allow Martian birds to fly ##-## ergo, if there are birds on Mars, they are flightless, like the Dodo.
 
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You start with de-planeting Pluto, and see where it leads to?
 
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swampwiz said:
Why is Mars not considered a "fully fledged" planet?
Read just the next sentence following the part you have qouted:
There may have been many planetary embryos in the early Solar System, but the only one that still survives is Mars, which is not a fully fledged planet like Earth or Venus.
The late stages of accretion involve giant impacts that release enormous amounts of energy. We think the last impact in Earth’s accretion involved a Mars-sized embryo hitting the growing Earth...
As it is believed that Mars didn't experience such a big impact, from this point of view it didn't go through the last stage of planetary formation. I am not sure how much is this hypothesis respected, but other sources mention it too, see below quotes and links.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00184
With approximately one ninth of Earth's mass, Mars is widely considered to be a stranded planetary embryo that never became a fully-grown planet.

https://Earth'sky.org/space/mars-is-a-planetary-embryo-study-shows
According to planet formation theory, there was a process of building that went on in the early solar system – smaller planetesimals to larger planetary embryos to actual planets. The idea here is that – while Earth formed slowly from planetary embryos colliding – Mars is itself a solitary planetary embryo that formed very early in the history of our solar system.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-13567381
By modelling this process, astro-physicists can determine the size of planets they expect to form at a given distance from the Sun. Mars is an outlier; it should have grown to around the size of the Earth, but remains about one-tenth its size.

Because of Mars' small size, many scientists have long suspected that the Red Planet avoided the collisions that allowed other neighbouring planets to increase their girth
 
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It all sounds like a play on words!
 
Perhaps the designation has to do with lack of internal dynamics sufficient to create a Magnetic field. As I understand it this may be responsible for the "ablation" of the Martian atmosphere by solar wind, (but I don't understand much).
 
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hutchphd said:
Perhaps the designation has to do with lack of internal dynamics sufficient to create a Magnetic field. As I understand it this may be responsible for the "ablation" of the Martian atmosphere by solar wind, (but I don't understand much).
Venus does not have much magnetic field either.
 
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The first my thought was, "It's just a play on words," but @lomidrevo post made me think a little more deeply about it. I seem to have a good knowledge of astronomy, but I completely forgot about the different stages of planet formation. However, it's just a theory. Now, Mars is considered to be a planet, and scientists ain't going to downgrade the status of Mars. However, anything is possible in this world.
 

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