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YORP effect spins asteroid to death

sevenperforce

By sevenperforce
in Science & Spaceflight

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sevenperforce

sevenperforce

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As space news go, this is pretty darn cool....

https://bgr.com/2019/03/28/spinning-asteroid-debris-6478-gault/

Because the asteroid is uneven in size, it is heated unevenly and its blackbody radiation pressure makes it act like a propeller. Its centrifugal forces are equal to its gravitational forces and so it is ripping itself apart.

This is the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-0Radzievskii-Paddack effect (helpfully compressed to YORP) which was discovered in the 1970s.

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