(February 16, 2018 at 10:18 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: FWIW, Don't have any proof, but statistically speaking, it would be profoundly unlikely for any of the outermost retinue of Jupiter's (or Saturn's for that manner) to not contain any binary objects or to have their own moons.
Seriously. We've found asteroids scooting by earth with moons, the outer most flock of Jupiter's satellites are captured asteroids, there's gotta be some moons of moons there, even if we haven't detected any yet.
Captured asteroids are likely tO have first been captured into highly elliptical orbits, which would subject them to highly varied gravitational interactions with Jupiter and its existing moons. Given typical asteriod’s very surface gravity and very low orbital velocity of any moon of its own that previously orbited it prior to the capture, it seems to me there is high chance any objects orbiting a captured asteroid would be striped from the gravity influence of the asteroid during orbital evolution of the asteroid around Jupiter.