The Breakup of a Main-Belt Asteroid 450 Thousand Years Ago

@article{Nesvorn2006TheBO,
  title={The Breakup of a Main-Belt Asteroid 450 Thousand Years Ago},
  author={David Nesvorn{\'y} and David Vokrouhlick{\'y} and William F. Bottke},
  journal={Science},
  year={2006},
  volume={312},
  pages={1490 - 1490}
}
Collisions in the asteroid belt frequently lead to catastrophic breakups, where more than half of the target's mass is ejected into space. Several dozen large asteroids have been disrupted by impacts over the past several billion years. These impact events have produced groups of fragments with similar orbits called asteroid families. Here we report the discovery of a very young asteroid family around the object 1270 Datura. Our work takes advantage of a method for identification of recent… 
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References

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TLDR
The discovery of a family of asteroids that formed in a disruption event only 5.8 ± 0.2 million years ago, and which has subsequently undergone little dynamical and collisional evolution, is reported.
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In 1983, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite discovered two pairs of dust bands, straddling the ecliptic plane and located in the asteroid belt. New analysis of the IRAS data has resulted in the…
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Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) observations in 1983 revealed the existence of several solar system dust bands. These dust bands are believed to be debris produced by recent disruption events…
Asteroid Families. I. Identification by Hierarchical Clustering and Reliability Assessment
This manuscript is based upon work supported by NASA's Planetary Geology and Geophysics program and the Czech Grant Agency