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What are Families of Minor Planets?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2015

Yoshihide Kozai
Yoshihide Kozai*
Affiliation:
National Astronomical Observatory, Mitaka, Tokyo 181, Japan

Abstract

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This paper describes how the families of minor planets were discovered and how minor planets are classified into families and shows several evidences that at least some families were originated by collisions of minor planets. In fact for major families there are much more fainter minor planets than in other regions and when the families were discovered by Hirayama in 1918 only one sixth of the total numbered minor planets belonged to families whereas now more than one third of them belong to the families. It is also emphasized that the classification into the families is theory dependent and that any theory available now is not accurate enough to derive stable quantities for the families to study their origins as the families are usually bounded partly by mean motion and/or secular motion commensurability regions in the phase space.

Type
Joint Discussions
Information
Highlights of Astronomy , Volume 8: Highlights of Astronomy. As presented at the XXth General Assembly of the IAU, 1988 , 1989 , pp. 251 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © Kluwer 1989

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