The family is named for its largest member, 832 Karin, which has a diameter of about 19 km (12 mi).
The family is believed to have been created 5.8 ± 0.2 million years ago,[1] making it the most recent known asteroid collision.
The fact that we know when their surfaces were formed will also be useful in determining the rate of crater formation in asteroids.
It is estimated that in about 100 million years the family will have dispersed to a degree where it cannot be separated from the background population of asteroids.
The family may also be the source of one of the interplanetary dust bands discovered by the IRAS satellite and may also have generated meteorites which would have compositions consistent with S-type asteroids and cosmic ray exposure ages of approximately 5.8 million years.
A study of the Karin family has for the first time detected the Yarkovsky effect in main belt asteroids.