Hektor family

Background

The Hektor family is a collisional asteroid family, meaning its members are fragments created by a collision with the original larger asteroid, 624 Hektor. All members share similar orbits as a result of that event. The family is part of the Jupiter trojan dynamical group, a set of asteroids that orbit about 60 degrees ahead of or behind Jupiter at the Lagrange points L4 and L5; the Hektor family resides in the L4 cloud, the Greek camp. Members of the Hektor family are both part of this wider Trojan dynamical group and physical fragments of 624 Hektor.

All known members are dark D-type asteroids with albedos around 0.03–0.04. The family is considered non-catastrophic because 624 Hektor, its largest member, accounts for nearly all of the family's total mass, rather than being simply the largest among many fragments each making up a small fraction of the original destroyed asteroid. The age of the family is very poorly constrained due to the lack of known small members to model, with different methods of analysis suggesting ages of 1–4 billion years and 0.1–2.5 billion years.