Detectability of the Yarkovsky Effect in the Main Belt

Abstract

We attempt to detect a signal of Yarkovsky-related acceleration in the orbits of 134 main belt asteroids (MBAs) we observed with the University of Hawai’i 88 inch telescope, supplemented with observations publicly available from the Minor Planet Center and Gaia Data Release 3. We estimated the expected Yarkovsky acceleration values based on parameters derived through thermophysical modeling, but we were not able to find any reliable detections of Yarkovsky in our sample. Through tests with synthetic observations, however, we estimated the minimum observational arc length needed to detect the Yarkovsky effect for all of our sample MBAs, which in nearly every case exceeded the current arc length of the existing observations. We find that the Yarkovsky effect could be detectable within a couple of decades of discovery for a 100 m MBA assuming 0.″1 astrometric accuracy, which is at the size range detectable by the upcoming Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time.