The recent breakup of an asteroid in the main-belt region

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Abstract
The present population of asteroids in the main belt is largely the result of many past collisions1,2. Ideally, the asteroid fragments resulting from each impact event could help us understand the large-scale collisions that shaped the planets during early epochs3,4,5. Most known asteroid fragment families, however, are very old and have therefore undergone significant collisional and dynamical evolution since their formation6. This evolution has masked the properties of the original collisions. Here we report the discovery of a family of asteroids that formed in a disruption event only 5.8 ± 0.2 million years ago, and which has subsequently undergone little dynamical and collisional evolution5,6. We identified 39 fragments, two of which are large and comparable in size (diameters of ∼ 19 and ∼ 14 km), with the remainder exhibiting a continuum of sizes in the range 2–7 km. The low measured ejection velocities suggest that gravitational re-accumulation after a collision may be a common feature of asteroid evolution. Moreover, these data can be used to check numerical models of larger-scale collisions8.

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