Gefion family

Properties

The members have proper orbital elements in the approximate ranges

At the present epoch, the range of osculating orbital elements of these core members is

The namesake is 1272 Gefion. The family is fairly large, e.g. the Zappala 1995 analysis found about a hundred core members. A search of a recent proper element database found 766 objects (about 0.8% of the total) lying within the region defined by the first table above.

2631 Zhejiang has a diameter of 34 km, and is the largest core member whose diameter has been reliably estimated, although 2911 Miahelena is brighter, and would have a rough diameter of about 47 km, given the same (very low) albedo of 0.025.

Alternative name and interlopers

Until recently, this family was known as the Ceres family (adj. Cererean) or the Minerva family (adj. Minervian) after 1 Ceres (the largest asteroid) or 93 Minerva. However, spectroscopic analyses showed that these largest members were in fact interlopers in their own family, having a different spectral class from the bulk of the members. Other known interlopers are 255 Oppavia, 374 Burgundia, 2507 Bobone, and 2559 Svoboda. This left the fairly minor asteroid 1272 Gefion as the lowest-numbered member.

List of members

This is a list of the known family members, without the above-mentioned interlopers.

References

References

1. according to the HCM analysis by [[Vincenzo Zappalà. V. Zappalà]], Ph. Bendjoya, A. Cellino, [[Paolo Farinella. P. Farinella]] and C. Froeschlé, ''[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001910358571127X Asteroid Families: Search of a 12,487-Asteroid Sample Using Two Different Clustering Techniques]'', Icarus, Volume 116, Issue 2 (August 1995), pages 291–314
2. [https://newton.spacedys.com/cgi-bin/astdys/astibo?proper_elements:0;main AstDys] {{webarchive. link. (February 20, 2006)
3. A. Cellino et al. ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20180504225626/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8e92/5801ebd56d0ca14fc61a47b23933e03d2de9.pdf Spectroscopic Properties of Asteroid Families]'', in ''Asteroids III'', p. 633-643, University of Arizona Press (2002). (Table on page 636, in particular).
4. Identified by inspection of the [http://smass.mit.edu/Bus.Taxonomy SMASSII data set] {{webarchive. link. (January 5, 2006 , S.J. Bus and R.P. Binzel, ''Phase II of the Small Main-Belt Asteroid Spectroscopic Survey'', Icarus Vol. 158, p. 106 (2002).)
5. "Archived copy".