ALJBAAE , Safwan

An asteroid family forms as a result of a collision between an impactor and a parent body. The fragments with ejection speeds higher than the escape velocity from the parent body can escape its gravitational pull. The cloud of escaping debris can be identified by the proximity of orbits in proper element, or frequency, domains. Obtaining...

The Cybele region, located between the 2J:-1A and 5J:-3A mean-motion resonances, is adjacent and exterior to the asteroid main belt. An increasing density of three-body resonances makes the region between the Cybele and Hilda populations dynamically unstable, so that the Cybele zone could be considered the last outpost of an extended main belt....

Ceres is the largest and most massive body in the asteroid main belt. Observational data from the Dawn spacecraft reveal the presence of at least two impact craters about 280 km in diameter on the Ceres surface, that could have expelled a significant number of fragments. Yet, standard techniques for identifying dynamical asteroid families have...

Asteroid families are groups of minor bodies produced by high-velocity collisions. After the initial dispersions of the parent bodies fragments, their orbits evolve because of several gravitational and non-gravitational effects, such as diffusion in mean-motion resonances, Yarkovsky and Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effects,...

Many asteroid families are identified and well characterized all over the main asteroid belt. Interestingly, however, none of them are older than 4 Gyr. Many mechanisms have been proposed to disperse such old primordial asteroid families that presumably have existed, but only very few have really worked. Here we present a plausible mechanism...