Ivan Osipovich Yarkovsky () (24 May 1844, Asveya,

Vitebsk Governorate Vitebsk Governorate (, ) was an administrative-territorial unit ('' guberniya'') of the Russian Empire, with the seat of governorship in Vitebsk. It was established in 1802 by splitting Belarusian Governorate and existed until 1924. Today most ...

– 22 January 1902,

Heidelberg Heidelberg (; ; ) is the List of cities in Baden-Württemberg by population, fifth-largest city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, and with a population of about 163,000, of which roughly a quarter consists of studen ...

) was a Polish–Russian civil engineer. Born to a

Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Polish people, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken * Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin ...

family in Asveya (

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

, now

Belarus Belarus, officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Belarus spans an a ...

), he worked for a Russian railway company and was obscure in his own time. Beginning in the 1970s, long after Yarkovsky's death, his work on the effects of thermal radiation on small objects in the

Solar System The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Sola ...

(e.g.,

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet—an object larger than a meteoroid that is neither a planet nor an identified comet—that orbits within the Solar System#Inner Solar System, inner Solar System or is co-orbital with Jupiter (Trojan asteroids). As ...

s) was developed into the

Yarkovsky effect The Yarkovsky effect is a force acting on a rotating body in space caused by the anisotropic emission of thermal photons, which carry momentum. It is usually considered in relation to meteoroids or small asteroids (about 10 cm to 10 km ...

and the

YORP effect The Yarkovsky–O'Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack effect, or YORP effect for short, changes the rotation state of a small astronomical body – that is, the body's spin rate and the obliquity of its pole(s) – due to the scattering of solar radia ...

, thanks to his rediscovery by Estonian astronomer

Ernst J. Öpik Ernst is both a surname and a given name, the German, Dutch, and Scandinavian form of Ernest. Notable people with the name include: Surname * Adolf Ernst (1832–1899) German botanist known by the author abbreviation "Ernst" * Anton Ernst (born ...

. The

35334 Yarkovsky is named in his honour . In 1888, he also created a mechanical explanation of gravitation.

References

Literature

* *

External links

Citations for asteroids discovered at Sormano Astronomical Observatory
1844 births 1902 deaths People from Verkhnyadzvinsk district People from Drissensky Uyezd 19th-century Polish astronomers Polish civil engineers Engineers from the Russian Empire {{Europe-astronomer-stub