Catalog of Proper Orbits for 1.25 Million Main-belt Asteroids and Discovery of 136 New Collisional Families

Abstract

The proper elements of asteroids are obtained from the instantaneous orbital elements by removing periodic oscillations produced by gravitational interactions with planets. They are unchanged in time, at least if chaotic dynamics and nongravitational forces could be ignored, and can therefore be used to identify fragments of major collisions (asteroid families) that happened eons ago. Here we present a new catalog of proper elements for 1.25 × 106 main-belt asteroids. We explain the methodology, evaluate uncertainties, and discuss how the new catalog can be used to identify asteroid families. A systematic search for families yielded 153 cases not reported in Nesvorný et al.—17 of these cases were identified in various other publications, and 136 cases are new discoveries. There are now 274 families in the asteroid belt in total (plus a handful of families in the resonant Hilda population). We analyzed several compact families in detail. The new family around the middle-belt asteroid (9332) 1990SB1 (nine members) is the youngest family found so far (estimated formation only 16–17 kyr ago). The new families (1217) Maximiliana, (6084) Bascom, (10164) Akusekijima, and (70208) 1999RX33 all formed 0.5–2.5 Myr ago. The (2110) Moore–Sitterly family is a close pair of relatively large bodies, 2110 and 44612, and 15 small members all located sunward from 2110 and 44612, presumably a consequence of the Yarkovsky drift over the estimated family age (1.2–1.5 Myr). A systematic characterization of the new asteroid families is left for future work.