why do planets have multiple moons or no moons at all instead of one like earth?

Question

why do planets have multiple moons or no moons at all instead of one like earth?

In: 1

Answer 1

There’s no easy answer to this question because it’s not well phrased. The answer is “things turned out that way for Earth, but Earth’s kinda… strange”.

Stars are huge gravity wells. That means they attract lots and lots of nearby stuff. They have massive clumps of rock and dust and grit and gas that spins around them. Sometimes stuff from outside of the star’s influence comes in and messes stuff up. A lot of times, it doesn’t.

So there’s this chance that, out of all of the billions and trillions of possibilites, something like Earth and its companion Moon pops up around its star.

And there’s a FAR FAR greater chance that out of all the billions and trillions of possibilities, nothing at all like Earth and its companion Moon pops up.

Nobody designed our Earth / Moon / Sun combination. We just got lucky on a cosmic dice roll.