Efficiency characterization of the V-shape asteroid family detection method

Abstract

Following the break up of a parent body, the Yarkovsky effect causes asteroid family members to spread in orbital semimajor axis with a rate often inversely proportional to their diameter. This size dependent semimajor axis drift causes family members to form structures in the semimajor axis vs inverse diameter plane that have the shape of the letter V. The V-shape method consists in finding the borders of such V-shapes of unknown center and opening. Although successfully employed to find some very old families in the inner main asteroid belt, the V-shape searching method is very sensitive to many parameters. In this work, we first created and evolved a synthetic asteroid family over billions of years. Then, by adding uncertainties to semimajor axis and diameter of the evolved synthetic family components, we randomly generated additional 99 similar, but not perfectly V-shaped, family clones. We chose a fairly low initial velocity dispersion of 20 m/s for our family. Thus, we can more easily relate the spreading in semimajor axis with the family’s age (slope of the evolving V). A synthetic background with an initially randomly distributed components was also created and evolved for 100 Myr. Thus, by setting different levels of ratio of the synthetic family and background asteroids, we derived a detection efficiency map for the V-shape method and determined how sensitive the results can be based on signal-to-noise levels. We also determined optimal parameter values for the method’s efficiency. We found that, families older than ≈3 Gyr are likely undetectable, with a method efficiency of 50% or less, whereas younger families (0.5–2.5 Gyr) are more easily detected by the method, with an efficiency of ≳80%.