A Census Before Rubin of Asteroid Families in the Main Belt

TL;DR

This paper catalogs 335 asteroid families in the main belt, estimating their ages, compositions, and parent body sizes, revealing patterns in their formation and evolution over time.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive catalog of asteroid families with detailed properties and insights into their formation ages and physical characteristics.

Findings

Older families are hard to identify due to Yarkovsky drift.

Young families tend to have small parent bodies.

The catalog includes detailed membership data for 335 families.

Abstract

A collisional family is a collection of >km-size asteroid fragments produced by a large scale collision between asteroids. Here we cataloged 335 notable collisional families in the main asteroid belt. When possible, we estimated each family's formation age, mean visible albedo, taxonomic type, and parent body size. We found that older families (t_age>10 Myr) produced by impacts on small parent bodies (diameter D<5 km) are rarely identified because small members of these families have drifted over time by the Yarkovsky effect and blended with the background. The young families (t_age<10 Myr) typically have small parent bodies (D<10 km) as large asteroids do not disrupt often enough. The full catalog, including membership files for 335 individual asteroid families, is available for download (https://www.boulder.swri.edu/~davidn/Proper25).