Bruce Bostwick wrote:
...
And why with 100+ moons, none of them has a sub-moon?
My guess would be that there just aren't many stable solutions to a
close-in three-body problem like that. Jupiter's gravitational effects
dominate the orbital dynamics of a good part of the solar system, and
many of its satellites are fairly close to its Roche limit to begin
with, so my back-of-the-napkin guess would be that sub=moons would be
extremely rare and tend not to be in very stable orbits.
Bruce--
I think there certainly are stable solutions
for some planet/moon systems without submoons.
The orbit of the submoon would have to be definitely
inside the Hill sphere of the moon. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_sphere
To me, the problem is more that it's very unlikely
that objects will get captured by the moon.
---David
And smaller fleas to bite them, Maru
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