Asteroid Families: properties, recent advances and future opportunities

TL;DR

This review discusses asteroid families' properties, recent scientific advances, and future research opportunities, emphasizing dynamic aspects, young families, and their links to water-ice and comets in the asteroid belt.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of asteroid family properties, recent progress in identification and age determination, and highlights future challenges and developments in the field.

Findings

Recent advances in family identification and age estimation.

Significant insights into young asteroid families.

Connections between asteroid families, water-ice, and main-belt comets.

Abstract

Collisions are one of the key processes shaping planetary systems. Asteroid families are outcomes of such collisions still identifiable across our solar system. The families provide a unique view of catastrophic disruption phenomena and have been in the focus of planetary scientists for more than a century. Most of them are located in the main belt, a ring of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Here we review the basic properties of the families, discuss some recent advances, and anticipate future challenges. This review pays more attention to dynamic aspects such as family identification, age determination, and long-term evolution. The text, however, goes beyond that. Especially, we cover the details of young families that see the major advances in the last years, and we anticipate it will develop even faster in the future. We also discuss the relevance of asteroid families for water-ice content in the asteroid belt and our current knowledge on links between families and main-belt comets.