The Breakup of a Main-Belt Asteroid 450 Thousand Years Ago

Details The Breakup of a Main-Belt Asteroid 450 Thousand Years Ago The Breakup of a Main-Belt Asteroid 450 Thousand Years Ago

Jun 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006sci...312.1490n&link_type=abstract

Science, Vol. 312, p. 1490

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

32

Asteroids

Scientific paper

Collisions in the asteroid belt frequently lead to catastrophic breakups, where more than half of the target's mass is ejected into space. Several dozen large asteroids have been disrupted by impacts over the past several billion years. These impact events have produced groups of fragments with similar orbits called asteroid families. Here we report the discovery of a very young asteroid family around the object 1270 Datura. Our work takes advantage of a method for identification of recent breakups in the asteroid belt using catalogs of osculating (i.e., instantaneous) asteroid orbits. The very young families show up in these catalogs as clusters in a five-dimensional space of osculating orbital elements.

Affiliated with

Also associated with

No associations

Rating

The Breakup of a Main-Belt Asteroid 450 Thousand Years Ago does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with The Breakup of a Main-Belt Asteroid 450 Thousand Years Ago, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and The Breakup of a Main-Belt Asteroid 450 Thousand Years Ago will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

Comments { 0 }

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1480151