The Karin family or Karin cluster is an

asteroid family An asteroid family is a population of asteroids that share similar proper orbital elements, such as semimajor axis, eccentricity, and orbital inclination. The members of the families are thought to be fragments of past asteroid collisions. An a ...

and sub-group of the Koronis family. It consists of at least 90

main-belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere ...

s. What makes them special is that scientists have used the orbits of 13 members to calculate backwards until they were all found to share the same orbit — that of the parent body from which they all originated. The family is named for its largest member,

832 Karin 832 Karin is a minor planet orbiting the Sun. It is the largest and brightest member of the Karin Cluster, which is named after it. Found in 2002, the Karin cluster is notable for being very young. It is currently believed to have formed in a co ...

, which has a diameter of about . It represents about 15–20% of the mass of the original body which had an estimated diameter of . (832) Karin is an

S-type asteroid S-type asteroids are asteroids with a spectral type that is indicative of a siliceous (i.e. stony) mineralogical composition, hence the name. They have relatively high density. Approximately 17% of asteroids are of this type, making it the secon ...

. (4507) 1990FV was originally thought to be a member of the family but was identified in 2004 as an interloper. The other members have diameters in the 1–7 km range (0.6–4.3 miles). The family is believed to have been created 5.8 ± 0.2 million years ago,Space.com: Recent Crash Created Youngest Known Asteroid Family
making it the most recent known asteroid collision. Because the surfaces of the family members are relatively pristine, spectroscopic analysis can tell scientists much about their composition and could shed new light on the question of how closely asteroids and meteorites are related. The fact that we know when their surfaces were formed will also be useful in determining the rate of crater formation in asteroids. It is estimated that in about 100 million years the family will have dispersed to a degree where it cannot be separated from the background population of asteroids. The family may also be the source of one of the interplanetary dust bands discovered by the

IRAS The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (Dutch: ''Infrarood Astronomische Satelliet'') (IRAS) was the first space telescope to perform a survey of the entire night sky at infrared wavelengths. Launched on 25 January 1983, its mission lasted ten mon ...

satellite and may also have generated meteorites which would have compositions consistent with S-type asteroids and

cosmic ray Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our o ...

exposure ages of approximately 5.8 million years. A study of the Karin family has for the first time detected the

Yarkovsky effect The Yarkovsky effect is a force acting on a rotating body in space caused by the anisotropic emission of thermal photons, which carry momentum. It is usually considered in relation to meteoroids or small asteroids (about 10 cm to 10 km ...

in main belt asteroids.

References

{{reflist 1. Nesvorný, D., et al. 2002. The recent breakup of an asteroid in the main-belt region. Nature 417(6890):720-722. 2. Nesvorný, D., Bottke, W.F., Levison, H.F., Dones, L., 2003. Recent origin of the Solar System dust bands. Astrophys. J. 591, 486–497. 3. Nesvorný, D., & Bottke, W. F. 2004. Detection of the Yarkovsky effect for main-belt asteroids. Icarus 170: 324–342. 4. Nesvorný, D et al. 2006. Karin cluster formation by asteroid impact. Icarus 183: 296–311. * Asteroid groups and families