ITHACA, N.Y. (Reuters) - Like some dysfunctional family outing, related groups of asteroids race around together in the same orbital track after being broken apart by shattering collisions, an astronomer reported Tuesday.
There could be as many as 100 of these shattered asteroid families in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, according to Schelte Bus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The families are created when a larger asteroid, perhaps 60 miles in diameter, slams into another cosmic body and breaks into pieces, Bus said at a news conference at Cornell University, site of a five-day scientific meeting on asteroids, comets and meteors.
The resulting smaller asteroids remain in roughly the same orbit as the parent.
The largest of these families may have as many as 500 members, while the smallest have perhaps five or 10, Bus said.
Such cosmic families have long been the subject of speculation, but the latest research adds new evidence.
Astronomers are interested in these remnants of heavenly collisions because the pieces often show what was inside the parent asteroid, giving better clues as to its composition and to how the earliest bodies in the solar system formed.
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