{"id":222685,"date":"2025-09-30T04:34:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T09:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/scientists-discover-63-new-young-asteroid-families-more-than-doubling-the-previous-number"},"modified":"2025-09-30T04:34:39","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T09:34:39","slug":"scientists-discover-63-new-young-asteroid-families-more-than-doubling-the-previous-number","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/scientists-discover-63-new-young-asteroid-families-more-than-doubling-the-previous-number","title":{"rendered":"Scientists discover 63 new young asteroid families\u2014more than doubling the previous number"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-discover-63-new-young-asteroid-families-more-than-doubling-the-previous-number2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Young asteroids\u2014which formed much later than those that were created during the formation of our solar system\u2014are typically created when larger asteroids, planetesimals, or comets collide and break up into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces form \u201casteroid families\u201d that share certain properties, like their semimajor axis, eccentricity, and inclination\u2014all of which describe their orbital paths.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists generally describe young asteroid families as being less than around 10\u201315 million years old and consisting of at least three members. New research, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sciencedirect.com\/science\/article\/abs\/pii\/S0019103525003161?via%3Dihub\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the journal <i>Icarus<\/i>, just revealed 63 newly discovered young asteroid families less than around 10 million years old. While many of these young families are likely to exist in our solar system, only 43 had been previously documented. The new study used a five-dimensional Hierarchical Clustering Method (HCM) with a catalog of 1.25 million asteroid orbits, which enabled the team to bring the total number of known young asteroid families to 106.<\/p>\n<p>The team searched for clustering in proper orbital elements (semimajor axis, eccentricity, inclination, nodal and perihelion longitudes) at various times in the past 10 million years to find groups with similar elements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Young asteroids\u2014which formed much later than those that were created during the formation of our solar system\u2014are typically created when larger asteroids, planetesimals, or comets collide and break up into smaller pieces. These smaller pieces form \u201casteroid families\u201d that share certain properties, like their semimajor axis, eccentricity, and inclination\u2014all of which describe their orbital paths. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}