Kirkwood Gaps

Kirkwood gaps, interruptions that appear in the distribution of asteroid semimajor axes where the orbital period of any small body present would be a simple fraction of that of Jupiter. Several zones of low density in the minor-planet population were noticed about 1860 by Daniel Kirkwood, an American mathematician and astronomer, who explained the gaps as resulting from perturbations by Jupiter. An object that revolved around the Sun in one of the gaps would be disturbed regularly by Jupiter’s gravitational pull and eventually moved to another orbit. Some of those gaps are the primary sources of the near-Earth asteroids, which form from collisions between main-belt asteroids located close to a Kirkwood gap. Those collisions produce small asteroids that then have their orbits perturbed by the Yarkovsky effect (a small force that is due to the anisotropic emission of thermal radiation from an asteroid’s surface and works most efficiently on small asteroids), allowing them to drift into the Kirkwood gap. By the same Jupiter perturbations that originally cleared those gaps, those small asteroids evolve into orbits that cross Earth’s and from which they are eventually ejected from the solar system unless they first collide with a planet.