Implications of the YORP Effect for Our Understanding of Asteroid Evolution

Details Implications of the YORP Effect for Our Understanding of Asteroid Evolution Implications of the YORP Effect for Our Understanding of Asteroid Evolution

Oct 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007dps....39.0507b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, DPS meeting #39, #5.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.416

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

YORP thermal torques can spin asteroids up, spin them down, and modify their spin poles. If carefully modeled, we can use the effects of YORP effect to probe asteroid evolution and solar system history. Consider these examples. (1) Some asteroids end up rotating so fast by YORP that they shed mass to slow themselves down. This mechanism may create asteroid satellites among main belt and near-Earth asteroids. Alternatively, some asteroids spin themselves down so far that they lose nearly all of their rotational angular momentum. This explains how some asteroids enter into tumbling rotation states (e.g., (4179) Toutatis). (2) The Yarkovsky/YORP effects work together to deliver asteroids and meteoroids to resonances where they can escape the main belt. When a small main belt asteroid is created in a collision event, it immediately begins to drift by Yarkovsky thermal forces. The body's speed and direction, however, are controlled by its spin axis orientation, which is affected by YORP. This means the amount of material escaping the asteroid belt is effectively regulated by the YORP effect. In addition, the distance traversed by fragments from a breakup event, if carefully modeled, can be used like a clock to determine when the collision took place. Studying Yarkovsky/YORP evolution could therefore allow us to explore the precise history of main belt collision events over the last several Gy. (3) The YORP effect, working in tandem with planetary perturbations, can capture some bodies in spin-orbit resonances. This happened to the known prograde-rotating bodies in the Koronis asteroid family, all that have nearly identical spin rates and spin axes that roughly point toward the constellation Cassiopeia. Studies of such objects can be used to determine the age of asteroid families and the nature of main belt collision events over the last several Gy.

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