Thursday, March 08, 2007
ASTEROIDAL WARMING
The Gore Effect has some kind of fancy multi-named rival:
For the very first time, astronomers have witnessed the speeding up of an asteroid’s rotation, and have shown that it is due to a theoretical effect predicted but never seen before. The international team of scientists used an armada of telescopes to discover that the asteroid’s rotation period currently decreases by 1 millisecond every year, as a consequence of the heating of the asteroid’s surface by the Sun. Eventually it may spin faster than any known asteroid in the solar system and even break apart.
“The Yarkovsky-O’Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect is believed to alter the way small bodies in the Solar System rotate,” said Stephen Lowry, lead-author of one of the two companion papers in which this work is reported.
Hmm. What with YORP’s rotational heating and Gore’s locational cooling, the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe should be maintained quite nicely.