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Families can be present in many ways, with fads, quarrels and amusing anecdotes at that time. Aunt Suzy did that. You remember that one. But asteroid families take "there" and elevate it in space.
You might think of asteroids as brainless rock spots surrounding our solar system, and you would be quite correct. But these pieces of stone have a fascinating history of origin – one that scientists here on Earth are still trying to piece together.
In an article published in Nature Astronomy researchers found that by looking at the size of asteroids, in addition to their trajectory around the Sun, they could sort 85 percent of the asteroids in the inner solar system in about six families. Each family traces its lineage to a larger parent body (a small planet or planetoid) in the early days of the solar system.
At the time, the solar system was a much more crowded place, and these parent organisms began to jostle, with asteroids and moons and planetesimals snapping in newly formed planets and each other. The bodies that became the asteroids that we see today have finally fragmented into thousands of smaller pieces that honored their parents' legacy by generally sticking in their eccentric orbits, even though they did not live in the same giant rock orbiting the Sun
The idea of asteroidal families was not new in 1918 a Japanese researcher named Kiyotsugu Hirayamararqua that someheroids had elements similar to their orbit
"[Hirayama] noticed that the orbital elements of the asteroids – their eccentricity (the deviation of 39; a circle) and their inclination (which is their inclination towards the plane of the solar system) – he discovered that they were not random.There were some groups of asteroids with the same eccentricity and the same inclination, "says Stanley Dermott, lead author of the document Nature Astronomy Hirayama called these groups of asteroids with families of similar characteristics.
Since then, advances in astronomy have led to the discovery of hundreds of thousands of other asteroids, and new families have emerged. But overall, Hirayama's idea has held up over the past 100 years – with the exception of some outliers
"The work done to see if the orbital elements cluster exists shows that only half asteroids seem to be in families. "People could not place the other half, so they're called non-families," says Dermott. "Our work has shown that this division between family and non-family is probably wrong. "
" What we have done is discovered that there is also a relationship between these orbital elements and the size of the asteroids, "Dermott said. He and his colleagues examined the size of the asteroids and the distribution of asteroids of different sizes in the inner asteroid belt and could bring even more asteroids into the folds of the family, classifying 85% of the asteroids that they examined in about six families, each named after the biggest object in the cluster.
There is Vesta, Flora, Nysa, Polana, Eulalia and Hungaria. Probably the best known of these is Vesta, who received a NASA Dawn spacecraft visit in 2011.
The orbits of asteroids change slightly over time when the gravitational pull of Jupiter or Saturn pulls on space rocks. Other researchers have analyzed and documented these orbital changes, but Dermott and his colleagues examined how these changes were related to the size of the asteroids.
"We found that in the inner belt, the larger asteroids seem to have a higher inclination than the others. smaller asteroids. And it's a very particular observation, "says Dermott.
When he looked more closely, he noticed that the model was consistent in the family and" non-familial "asteroids, suggesting a connection between them Dermott says they had to come from the same families to see the same trends, and what many researchers considered "non-family" asteroids were likely to be part of these six families – they had simply become distant because of changes in their orbits that have evolved over the last four billion years.
The 200,000 asteroids analyzed by Dermott and his colleagues were only a fraction of the 780,292 asteroids identified by NASA up to The selected asteroids are all in the inner asteroid belt, an area closer to Earth and more studied than the average asteroid belt or ex It is planned to study families of the middle and outer asteroid belt in the future.
There is still much to learn about asteroids and many other ways to do it. In addition to statistical analysis like the work done by Dermott, there is also continuous analysis of meteorites – pieces of asteroids that reach the Earth – and two exciting missions to visit asteroids on their territory . OSIRIS-REx from NASA and Hayabusa-2 from Japan both aim to return asteroid samples to Earth in the next few years.
"We will only get tiny dust," says Dermott, "But you can do wonders"
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