Identification and Dynamical Properties of Asteroid Families

TL;DR

This paper reviews the identification, current inventory, and dynamical significance of asteroid families, highlighting their role in understanding the long-term evolution of main belt asteroids.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of asteroid family identification methods, catalogs 122 families, and discusses their importance in studying asteroid dynamics.

Findings

122 asteroid families cataloged and analyzed.

Asteroid families serve as tools to study long-term asteroid belt dynamics.

Methods for identifying asteroid families are summarized.

Abstract

Asteroids formed in a dynamically quiescent disk but their orbits became gravitationally stirred enough by Jupiter to lead to high-speed collisions. As a result, many dozen large asteroids have been disrupted by impacts over the age of the Solar System, producing groups of fragments known as asteroid families. Here we explain how the asteroid families are identified, review their current inventory, and discuss how they can be used to get insights into long-term dynamics of main belt asteroids. Electronic tables of the membership for 122 notable families are reported on the Planetary Data System node.