A dumb question

[Shadowy Man]

An object is radiating heat as EM energy while at the same tine is absorbing heat from the surrounding environment.

An object and its environment want to go to equilibrium.

Photons get murky. No mass but possessing momentum.

If Photons Have No Mass, How Can They Have Momentum? – Profound Physics

profoundphysics.com

But the Earth is only absorbing heat from one direction. There may be a power equilibrium but not a directional one.

The red-shift/blue-shift effect applies to incoming photons too, not just outgoing ones -- the solar heating that hits the morning side of the daytime hemisphere is a little bit bluer than the solar heating that hits the afternoon side.

but both the morning and afternoon are absorbing energy from the sun (be it a little blue- or red-shifted as you say) while the night side is not. That’s the asymmetry to which I refer.

Do you know of a mechanism by which that asymmetry affects the spin of the object? I can see how it would push the object away from the sun, but I'd expect that to be neutral with respect to the object's rotational angular momentum.

sorry. I was speaking more generally to the point Steve bank was making about equilibrium with the environment and that even though there maybe a power equilibrium it doesn’t mean there isn’t a momentum transfer asymmetry. I wasn’t speaking specifically to the impact on the spin of Earth.

When the earth then reradiates into space it’s more equally distributed.

I think that will depend on the object's size, temperature, thermal conductivity, shape, albedo, atmospheric CO2, yada yada. One aspect of the distribution that's well-studied is the Yarkovsky effect -- it's hotter in the afternoon than in the morning because of the time lag between absorption and reradiation, so the reradiation tends to push the object along in its orbit and make it spiral outward. It's measurable on small asteroids.

Sure, that’s why I said “more equally” and not “equal”. It’s difficult to imagine that those effects would conspire to make the reradiation only on the dayside. So whatever the emission distribution would be it would not be the same as the absorption.