Why do some planets have more natural satellites than others?

Answer 1

In our solar system, there are basically three main reasons why the outer giant planets have more satellites than the small inner planets.

1) The giants are more massive: Jupiter is far more massive than Mars (almost 3000 times) so it can attract and retain more stuff for longer periods.

2) More stuff to collect:
When the Sun "turned on", the initial blast cleared out most of the dust and small particles from its immediate surrounding, pushing it further out. As the inner planets completed their formation, there was little matter left to collect, in order to form satellites. Most of the junk was out there, for the giant planets to collect and form satellites. Plus, there is more space between successive giant planets, giving each of them even more stuff to collect.

3) competing with the Sun. It is possible to compute the distance at which the gravity from the Sun will be greater than the gravity from a planet. For inner planets, this distance is very short. In fact, the Moon is well outside this distance (the Earth-Moon pair is sometimes refered to as a twin-planet because of that). Jupiter, being more massive AND much further from the Sun, has a very large distance over which its gravity is stronger than the Sun's.

Answer 2

Well, probably because they were bigger than the others at the time when their galaxy was being formed, so that they had more particles which came apart from their big body and thus became satellites of that planet...

Answer 3

The number of satelites is a function of how big and massive is a planet...

Answer 4

because planets have different rate of gravity, which help the natural satelites to orbit around them.

Answer 5

Obviously they are greedy capitalist planets