The Influence of Global Self-Heating on the Yarkovsky and YORP Effects

TL;DR

This study extends models of asteroid thermal effects by incorporating global self-heating and rough surface beaming, revealing their significant impact on Yarkovsky and YORP effects, especially for accurate long-term asteroid evolution predictions.

Contribution

It introduces an adapted ATPM model that accounts for global self-heating and surface beaming effects, improving the accuracy of Yarkovsky and YORP effect predictions on irregular asteroids.

Findings

Yarkovsky effect is affected at the few percent level by self-heating.

YORP effect is highly sensitive to shadowing and self-heating, especially at low accelerations.

Global self-heating influences the shape of the YORP obliquity curve and the existence of a zero-acceleration point.

Abstract

We present an adaptation of the ATPM to simultaneously predict the Yarkovsky and YORP effects in the presence of global self-heating that occurs within the large concavities of irregularly shaped asteroids, which has been neglected or dismissed in all previous models. It is also combined with rough surface thermal-infrared beaming effects, which have been previously shown to enhance the Yarkovsky-orbital-drift and dampen on average the YORP-rotational-acceleration by orders of several tens of per cent. Tests on all published concave shape models of near-Earth asteroids, and also on one hundred Gaussian-random-spheres, show that the Yarkovsky effect is sensitive to shadowing and global self-heating effects at the few per cent level or less. For simplicity, Yarkovsky models can neglect these effects if the level of accuracy desired is of this order. Unlike the Yarkovsky effect, the YORP effect can be very sensitive to shadowing and global self-heating effects. Its sensitivity increases with decreasing relative strength of the YORP-rotational-acceleration, and doesn't appear to depend greatly on the degree of asteroid concavity. Global self-heating tends to produce a vertical offset in an asteroid's YORP-rotational-acceleration versus obliquity curve which is in opposite direction to that produced by shadowing effects. It also ensures that at least one critical obliquity angle exists at which zero YORP-rotational-acceleration occurs. Global self-heating must be included for accurate predictions of the YORP effect if an asteroid exhibits a large shadowing effect. If global self-heating effects are not included then it is found in ~75 per cent of cases that better predictions are produced when shadowing is also not included. Furthermore, global self-heating has implications for reducing the sensitivity of the YORP effect predictions to detailed variations in an asteroid's shape model.