Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Oct 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010dps....42.6306m&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #42, #63.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.1093
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
2
Scientific paper
Binary YORP (BYORP) has been hypothesized to be a main driver for the evolution of binary asteroid systems. One question that impacts how long BYORP can secularly change a binary system is the interaction of the librating secondary body. The well observed binary system 1999 KW4 is known to have a librational pitch motion, however the libration amplitude is expected to be quite small (Ostro et al.; Scheeres et al., Science, v314). Feedback between the dynamics of the mutual orbit and attitude dynamics of the secondary show that if the secondary exhibits large librations and the mutual orbit becomes eccentric, the secondary will enter a state of chaotic rotation (Cuk and Nesvorny, Icarus, June 2010), a condition that would stop the secular evolution of the orbit. We predict that the measured libration in 1999 KW4's secondary is insufficient to lead to such chaotic evolution, and present analysis that supports this conclusion.
BYORP remains to be verified, thus a crucial next step is to observe the effect in real systems. BYORP causes a binary orbit to either grow or shrink, which results in a quadratic drift in mean longitude compared to a Keplerian orbit. According to our theory, we expect that the mean longitude of 1999 KW4 is currently drifting at -3.7 degrees/year2. To detect this drift, a minimum of three occultation/eclipse observations of the system over a sufficiently long period of time are needed. In the case of 1999 KW4, a baseline of approximately 10 years between first and last measurements should allow accurate detection of the BYORP effect. A number of binary asteroid targets meet these requirements and may allow the BYORP effect to be detected within the next decade (see Pravec and Scheirich, 2010 DPS Abstract).
This work is supported by NASA's PGG program through grant NNX08AL51G.
McMahon J. J.
Scheeres Dan
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