Yarkovsky effect

The Yarkovsky effect is a

• Diurnal effect: On a rotating body illuminated by the Sun (e.g. an asteroid or the Earth), the surface is warmed by solar radiation during the day, and cools at night. The thermal properties of the surface cause a lag between the absorption of radiation from the Sun and the emission of radiation as heat, so the surface is warmest not when the Sun is at its peak but slightly later. This results in a difference between the directions of absorption and re-emission of radiation, which yields a net force along the direction of motion of the orbit. If the object is a
  retrograde rotator spirals inward. The diurnal effect is the dominant component for bodies with diameter greater than about 100 m.^[3]
• Seasonal effect: This is easiest to understand for the idealised case of a non-rotating body orbiting the Sun, for which each "year" consists of exactly one "day". As it travels around its orbit, the "dusk" hemisphere which has been heated over a long preceding time period is invariably in the direction of orbital motion. The excess of thermal radiation in this direction causes a braking force that always causes spiraling inward toward the Sun. In practice, for rotating bodies, this seasonal effect increases along with the axial tilt. It dominates only if the diurnal effect is small enough. This may occur because of very rapid rotation (no time to cool off on the night side, hence an almost-uniform longitudinal temperature distribution), small size (the whole body is heated throughout), or an axial tilt close to 90°. The seasonal effect is more important for smaller asteroid fragments (from a few metres up to about 100 m), provided their surfaces are not covered by an insulating regolith layer and they do not have exceedingly slow rotations. Additionally, on very long timescales over which the spin axis of the body may be repeatedly changed by collisions (and hence also the direction of the diurnal effect changes), the seasonal effect will also tend to dominate.^[3]

In general, the effect is size-dependent, and will affect the semi-major axis of smaller asteroids, while leaving large asteroids practically unaffected. For kilometre-sized asteroids, the Yarkovsky effect is minuscule over short periods: the force on asteroid 6489 Golevka has been estimated at 0.25 newtons, for a net acceleration of 10⁻¹² m/s². But it is steady; over millions of years an asteroid's orbit can be perturbed enough to transport it from the asteroid belt to the inner Solar System.

The mechanism is more complicated for bodies in strongly

The effect was first measured in 1991–2003 on the asteroid 6489 Golevka. The asteroid drifted 15 km from its predicted position over twelve years (the orbit was established with great precision by a series of radar observations in 1991, 1995, and 1999 from the Arecibo radio telescope).^[4]

Without direct measurement, it is very hard to predict the exact result of the Yarkovsky effect on a given asteroid's orbit. This is because the magnitude of the effect depends on many variables that are hard to determine from the limited observational information that is available. These include the exact shape of the asteroid, its orientation, and its albedo. Calculations are further complicated by the effects of shadowing and thermal "reillumination", whether caused by local craters or a possible overall concave shape. The Yarkovsky effect also competes with radiation pressure, whose net effect may cause similar small long-term forces for bodies with albedo variations or non-spherical shapes.

As an example, even for the simple case of the pure seasonal Yarkovsky effect on a spherical body in a circular orbit with 90°

• Asteroid
• Poynting–Robertson effect
• Radiation pressure
• YORP effect