Status Report

Asteroid Families: properties, recent advances and future opportunities

By SpaceRef Editor
May 16, 2022
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Bojan Novakovic, David Vokrouhlicky, Federica Spoto, David Nesvorny

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.

Comments: Review paper to appear in CeMDA’s topical collection on “Main Belt Dynamics”

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)

Cite as: arXiv:2205.06340 [astro-ph.EP](or arXiv:2205.06340v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.06340

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Submission history

From: Bojan Novakovic 

[v1] Thu, 12 May 2022 20:07:09 UTC (14,863 KB)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.06340

SpaceRef staff editor.