Multinomial Fits to the Observed Main Belt Asteroid Distribution

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Dohnanyi's theory predicts that a collisional system such as the asteroid population of the main belt should rapidly relax to a power--law stationary size distribution of the kind N(m) m-α , with α very close to 11/6, provided all the collisional response parameters are independent on size. The actual asteroid belt distribution at observable sizes, instead, does not exhibit such a simple fractal size distribution. We investigate the possibility that the actual stationary cumulative distribution of the main asteroid belt at observable sizes --- that substantially deviates from a power--law distribution --- may be instead fairly fitted by multinomial distributions. This multinomial behaviour, which is in contrast with the Dohnany stationary distribution, is related to the release of the hypothesis of self--similarity, mainly due to the increasing effect of self--gravity in collisional processes involving km--size objects in the real asteroid belt population. The present research has been carried on by A.Campo Bagatin thanks to an European Space Agency postdoctoral fellowship.

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