The phrase stems from a paper presented to the 2000 IAU general assembly by the planetary scientists Alan Stern and Harold F. Levison. The authors used several similar phrases as they developed a theoretical basis for determining if an object orbiting a star is likely to "clear its neighboring region" of planetesimals based on the object's mass and its orbital period. Steven Soter prefers to use the term "dynamical dominance", and Jean-Luc Margot notes that such language "seems less prone to misinterpretation".