Color Confirmation of Asteroid Families

Details Color Confirmation of Asteroid Families Color Confirmation of Asteroid Families

2002-08-05

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0208098v1

Astron.J.124:2943,2002

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

18 pages, color figures, accepted by AJ

Scientific paper

10.1086/344077

We discuss optical colors of 10,592 asteroids with known orbits selected from a sample of 58,000 moving objects observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). This is more than ten times larger sample that includes both orbital parameters and multi-band photometric measurements than previously available. We confirm that asteroid dynamical families, defined as clusters in orbital parameter space, also strongly segregate in color space. In particular, we demonstrate that the three major asteroid families (Eos, Koronis, and Themis), together with the Vesta family, represent four main asteroid color types. Their distinctive optical colors indicate that the variations in chemical composition within a family are much smaller than the compositional differences between families, and strongly support earlier suggestions that asteroids belonging to a particular family have a common origin. We estimate that over 90% of asteroids belong to families.

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