Collisional Formation and Modeling of Asteroid Families
Patrick Michel, Derek C. Richardson, Daniel D. Durda, Martin Jutzi, Erik Asphaug
(Submitted on 13 Feb 2015)
In the last decade, thanks to the development of sophisticated numerical codes, major breakthroughs have been achieved in our understanding of the formation of asteroid families by catastrophic disruption of large parent bodies. In this review, we describe numerical simulations of asteroid collisions that reproduced the main properties of families, accounting for both the fragmentation of an asteroid at the time of impact and the subsequent gravitational interactions of the generated fragments. The simulations demonstrate that the catastrophic disruption of bodies larger than a few hundred meters in diameter leads to the formation of large aggregates due to gravitational reaccumulation of smaller fragments, which helps explain the presence of large members within asteroid families. Thus, for the first time, numerical simulations successfully reproduced the sizes and ejection velocities of members of representative families. Moreover, the simulations provide constraints on the family dynamical histories and on the possible internal structure of family members and their parent bodies.
Comments: Chapter to appear in the (University of Arizona Press) Space Science Series Book: Asteroids IV
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1502.03929 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1502.03929v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Patrick Michel
[v1] Fri, 13 Feb 2015 09:59:36 GMT (1595kb)
