The diurnal Yarkovsky effect of irregularly shaped asteroids

Abstract

The Yarkovsky effect plays an important role in the motions of small celestial bodies. Increasingly improving observations bring the need of high-accuracy modelling of the effect. Using a multiphysics software COMSOL, we model the diurnal Yarkovsky effect in three dimensions and compare the results with that derived from the widely adopted theoretical linear model. We find that the linear model presents a high accuracy for spherical asteroids in most cases. The ranges of parameters in which the relative error of the linear model is over 10% are explored. For biaxial ellipsoidal asteroids (particularly oblate ones), the linear model systematically overestimates the transverse Yarkovsky force by ∼10%. The diurnal effect on triaxial ellipsoids is periodic for which no linear model is available. Our numerical calculations show that the average effects on triaxial ellipsoids are stronger than that on biaxial ellipsoids. We also investigate the diurnal effect on asteroids of real shapes and find it be overestimated by the linear model averagely by 16%, with a maximum up to 35%. To estimate the strength of Yarkovsky effect directly from the shape, we introduce a quantity "effective area" for asteroids of any shapes, and find a significant linear relationship between the Yarkovsky migration rate and the effective area. This brings great convenience to the estimation in practice.