THE mystery of why so many meteorites fall from the heavens may have been
cracked.
Most meteorites come from the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, but far
more asteroid fragments seem to escape than astronomers predict. Last year David
Vokrouhlicky of Charles University in Prague and Paolo Farinella of the
University of Trieste suggested that the Yarkovsky effect—the uneven
emission of heat by a rotating body warmed by the Sun—could resolve the
puzzle. Although the effect is tiny, over millions of years it could make
asteroids stray from their original orbits.
Now Vokrouhlicky and Farinella have developed…
