The Strength and Detectability of the YORP Effect in Near-Earth Asteroids: A Statistical Approach

Abstract

In addition to collisions and gravitational forces, it is now becoming widely acknowledged that photon recoil forces and torques from the asymmetric reflection and thermal re-radiation of sunlight are primary mechanisms that govern the rotational evolution of an asteroid. The Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect causes changes in the rotation rate and pole direction of an irregularly shaped asteroid. We present a simple Monte Carlo method to estimate the range of YORP-rotational-accelerations acting on a near-Earth asteroid (NEA) without knowledge of its detailed shape, and to estimate its detectability using light-curve observations. The method requires knowledge of an asteroid's orbital properties and size, and assumes that the future observational circumstances of an asteroid have already been thought through. It is verified by application to the observational circumstances of the seven YORP-investigated asteroids, and is then applied to 540 NEAs with NEOWISE and/or other diameter measurements, and to all NEAs using MPCORB absolute magnitudes. The YORP-detectability is found to be a strong function of the combined asteroid orbital and diameter properties, and is independent of the rotation period for NEAs that don't have very fast or slow rotation rates. The median and 1-sigma spread of YORP-rotational-acceleration expected to be acting on a particular NEA can be estimated from its semimajor axis, eccentricity, and diameter by using (eq. 1) and/or by using (eq. 2) if the diameter is instead estimated from the absolute magnitude by assuming a geometric albedo of 0.1. The length of a light-curve observational campaign required to achieve a 50 per cent probability of detecting the YORP effect in a particular NEA can be estimated by using (eq. 3) and/or by using (eq. 4) for an absolute-magnitude-estimated diameter.

26 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables. Accepted by MNRAS

References in corpus (2)

• Formation of asteroid pairs by rotational fission
• Effect of Density Inhomogeneity on YORP: The case of Itokawa

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