Editor's Summary
15 March 2007
Meet the family
In the asteroid belt there are many separate families of asteroids, each consisting of many asteroids with similar orbits that are remnants of a single catastrophic impact. No collisionally created families had been detected in the distant Solar System beyond Neptune. But now Brown et al. describe a family of Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) with surface properties and orbits nearly identical to those of 2003 EL61, which is the third-largest known KBO, large enough to have two moons. The collisional history of the family members should provide invaluable data on the consequences of giant impacts in the Solar System.
News and Views: Solar system: Portrait of a suburban family
The first 'collisional family' has been spotted among objects in the Kuiper belt, which lies on the outskirts of the Solar System. The identification could provide useful constraints on the outer Solar System's history.
Alessandro Morbidelli
doi:10.1038/446273a
Letter: A collisional family of icy objects in the Kuiper belt
Michael E. Brown, Kristina M. Barkume, Darin Ragozzine & Emily L. Schaller
doi:10.1038/nature05619
First paragraph | Full Text | PDF (705K) | Supplementary information