Flora Family - Interlopers

Interlopers

Because of the high background density of asteroids in this part of space, one might expect that a great number of interlopers (asteroids unrelated to the collision that formed the family) would be present. However, few have been identified. This is because interlopers are hard to distinguish from family members because the family is of the same spectral type (S) that dominates the inner main belt overall. The few interlopers that have been identified are all small (Florczak et al. 1998, and also by inspection of the PDS asteroid taxonomy data set for non S-type members.) They include 298 Baptistina, 422 Berolina, 2093 Genichesk, 2259 Sofievka (the largest, with a 21 km diameter), 2952 Lilliputia, 3533 Toyota, 3850 Peltier, 3875 Staehle, 4278 Harvey, 4396 Gressmann, and 4750 Mukai.

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