can moons have moons?

[gooddog15]

Exactly. Satellite = moon.

So that would be the Apollo CM. There are currently two US satellites orbiting the Moon - Artemis P1 & P2.

We are talking about a Natural satellite orbiting another natural satellite, what you're talking about is a Artificial satellites

[Starwhip]

Binary moon simulation:

Orbiting a body with the mass/radius of Earth, 2 moons orbiting one another on a barycenter. It's pretty stable, really, in terms of staying like that. I don't know about what happens on the planet's surface though.

[magnemoe]

However would it be stable over hundreds of million years.

Pluto or the other cupier bodies might have moons with moons, far easier for plutos moon to hold a moon than say earths moon or any of the other moons.

[SuperBigD60]

Is the only reason Pluto is able to have so many moons because it's so far away? I mean... wow. Pluto is 1/5th the mass of the moon. Yet the only planets in our system that have more moons than Pluto are the gas giants. Not bad, Pluto. Not bad.

Yes, that's precisely the reason.

Here's basically something like ksp's SOIs, and your distance from the sun will make you SOI bigger.

The idea of meta moons is something I've always been curious about. Clearly it must be rather rare with moons in our solar system, because we haven't found any.

tidal forces might be too chaotic to sustain this sort of binary system for very long, so maybe it might not happen very often for the similar reasons Venus doesn't have any satellites.

[peadar1987]

I think it's probably pretty unlikely, although that's just a hunch. I reckon once you get very far out from the sun, it's more likely that an object like Pluto will have more moons than that it will have few moons with their own satellites. Having more satellites leads to interactions that reduce the chances of a moonlet having a stable orbit around a moon.