Image Details
Caption: Figure 1.
Panels (a)–(c): Eunomia, Hungaria, and Vesta family asteroids in H–a (absolute magnitude versus proper semimajor axis) space. Orbital parameters are from Nesvorný HCM Asteroid Families V3.0 (available through the Planetary Data System, https://pds.nasa.gov/ds-view/pds/viewDataset.jsp?Identifier=EAR-A-VARGBDET-5-NESVORNYFAM-V3.0&resclass=data.dataset). The semimajor axes of the source asteroids (15 Eunomia, 434 Hungaria, and 4 Vesta) are marked by the vertical dashed lines, while the dashed–dotted lines represent observational completeness from H. P. Hendler & R. Malhotra (2020) adjusted through the procedure in Section 4. Also marked are the mean-motion orbital resonances that define the family boundaries. Panels (d)–(f): histograms of the semimajor axis distributions of small family members (the lower limits of which in H and inverse diameter ﹩1/D﹩ are noted in each panel), with the best-fit Gaussian distributions to the superimposed histograms. K-S one-sample tests fail to reject the hypothesis that the asteroid semimajor axes are drawn from the fitted Gaussian functions. We refer the reader to the Appendix for details on our statistical tests and a simple model that reproduces the semimajor axis distribution of small-D asteroids in these families.
© 2026. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.