Formation and Destruction of Small Binary Asteroids
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our understanding of binary asteroids is currently undergoing major revisions. Until recently, all known small binaries (primary diameters ≃1 km) were near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), making it plausible that they originate in close encounters with terrestrial planets, and were not to be found among the main belt asteroids (MBAs). First simulations of tidal disruption have produced incidence of binaries that roughly matched the observed fraction of binary NEAs. Thermal-radiation effects, most notably YORP (Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack), were not needed to explain the life cycle of binary asteroids, despite some theoretical arguments in favor of significant YORP evolution. Recent discovery of abundant small MBA binaries and a more self-consistent reassessment of effects of planetary encounters have put the primacy of planetary encounters in doubt and shown a need for new theoretical explanations. Here I show that the mass loss from the primary's surface due to YORP could explain the formation of kilometer-sized binary NEAs. I also suggest that the small-separation NEA binaries' observed properties are consistent with evolution through "binary YORP," rather than tidal stripping during planetary passages (when the pairs evolve beyond ~10 primary radii, encounters become important). Such a life cycle implies not only the extreme youth of small binary asteroids (<105 yr) but also short timescales for large-scale mass redistribution on most kilometer-sized asteroids, leading to a near-complete lack of craters on their surfaces.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it