Shaulladany family

Lore & Background

The Shaulladany family is a collisional asteroid family, meaning its members are fragments created by a collision with an original larger asteroid. This distinguishes it from a mere dynamical group, where asteroids share similar orbits only due to gravitational interactions with planets. All members of the Shaulladany family are dark, assumed to be C-type asteroids, with albedos of around 0.09. The family is considered non-catastrophic because its largest member, 37519 Amphios, makes up a majority of the family's total mass, rather than being simply the largest of many fragments each comprising a small fraction of the original destroyed asteroid.

Reader's Guide

The Shaulladany family is notable as a small collisional family embedded within the larger dynamical group of Jupiter trojans. Its existence demonstrates that asteroid families can form within the Trojan clouds, which are themselves concentrated by Jupiter's gravitational influence. The family's non-catastrophic nature—where the largest member retains most of the original mass—provides insight into the outcomes of certain types of asteroid collisions. The family's dark, C-type composition is typical of many outer-belt and Trojan asteroids, linking it to primitive, carbonaceous materials. With at least 13 known members, it represents a relatively sparse grouping, but its study helps refine models of collisional evolution in the Trojan population. The family's location in the L5 Trojan camp places it among objects that share Jupiter's orbit, trailing the planet by about 60 degrees.

Did You Know?

• The family is named for the 16-kilometre-across asteroid 247341 Shaulladany.
• The family lies in the trailing cloud around Jupiter's L5 Lagrange point, the Trojan camp.