Collisional Formation and Modeling of Asteroid Families

Abstract

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.

Chapter to appear in the (University of Arizona Press) Space Science Series Book: Asteroids IV

References in corpus (4)

• Full Numerical Simulations of Catastrophic Small Body Collisions
• Numerical simulations of impacts involving porous bodies: I. Implementing sub-resolution porosity in a 3D SPH Hydrocode
• SPH calculations of asteroid disruptions: The role of pressure dependent failure models
• Numerical Simulations of Collisional Disruption of Rotating Gravitational Aggregates: Dependence on Material Properties

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Constraints on the original ejection velocity fields of asteroid families
• Fragment properties from large-scale asteroid collisions: I: Results from SPH/N-body simulations using porous parent bodies and improved material models
• Detection of Cosmic Fullerenes in the Almahata Sitta Meteorite: Are They an Interstellar Heritage?
• Scattering V-type asteroids during the giant planets instability: A step for Jupiter, a leap for basalt
• Initial velocity V-shapes of young asteroid families
• Efficiency characterization of the V-shape asteroid family detection method
• Asteroid pairs: method validation and new candidates