Hello, friends! Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about those weird and wonderful words scientists use. Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:
THE YARKOVSKY EFFECT
Have you ever tried to count all the stars in the night sky? Well, that might be an easier job than finding and tracking all the asteroids that keep whizzing by our planet. Part of the problem is due to something called the Yarkovsky Effect.
Ivan Yarkovsky was a Polish engineer working in Russia. He was also a huge science enthusiast. If Yarkovsky were alive today, I imagine he’d be writing a blog about all the cool sciency research he was doing in his free time.
But it was the late 19th/early 20th Century. Blogging wasn’t an option, so instead Yarkovsky wrote pamphlets about science, which he circulated among his science enthusiast friends. And almost fifty years after Yarkovsky’s death, an Estonian astronomer by the name of Ernst Öpik would remember reading one of those pamphlets.
Imagine an asteroid orbiting the Sun. Sunlight causes this asteroid’s surface to get hot. Then, as the asteroid rotates, that heat energy radiates off into space. Would this radiating heat produce any thrust? Would there be enough thrust to push an asteroid off its orbital trajectory?
Öpik thought so, and in 1951 he wrote this paper introducing the idea to the broader scientific community. Today’s Sciency Words post would probably have been about the “Öpik Effect,” except Ernst Öpik was kind enough to give credit to the obscure blogger pamphlet writer who originally came up with the concept. Thus we have the Yarkovsky Effect.
And in 2003, radar observations of the asteroid 6489 Golevka confirmed that the Yarkovsky Effect is real! The asteroid had wandered 15 km away from its original course!
Around the same time, a copy of Ivan Yarkovsky’s original pamphlet was found in Poland. As described in this article, it seems Yarkovsky was working on the basis of some faulty premises and a few rather unscientific assumptions. He more or less stumbled upon the right idea by accident (but let’s not dwell on that part of the story).
Next time on Planet Pailly, no one’s going to name a scientific theory after me, but maybe there’s another sciency honor I can aspire to.
Planet Pailly 