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The recent discovery of the 2003EL61 collisional family in the Kuiper belt(Brown et al., 2007) is surprising because the formation of such a family is ahighly improbable event in today's belt. Assuming Brown et al.'s estimate ofthe size of progenitors, we find that the probability that a Kuiper belt objectwas involved in such a collision since primordial times is less than roughly0.001. In addition, it is not possible for the collision to have occurred in amassive primordial Kuiper belt because the dynamical coherence of the familywould not have survived whatever event produced the currently observed orbitalexcitation. Here we suggest that the family is the result of a collisionbetween two scattered disk objects. We show that the probability that acollision occurred between two such objects with sizes similar to thoseadvocated in Brown et al. (2007) and that the center of mass of the resultingfamily is on an orbit typical of the Kuiper belt can be as large as 47%. Giventhe large uncertainties involved in this estimate, this result is consistentwith the existence of one such family. If true, this result has implicationsfar beyond the origin of a single collisional family, because it shows thatcollisions played an important role in shaping the dynamical structure of thesmall body populations that we see today.

On a Scattered-Disk Origin for the 2003 El61 Collisional Family - an Example of the Importance of Collisions on the Dynamics of Small Bodies