New answers tagged orbital-migration
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Surely not a gas giant... Mercury is a rock of 0.05 $\rm m_{\oplus}$, such a mass could never grow into a gas giant (For detail see Piso & Youdin (2014), fig. 6, where you can see that below a planet mass of 5 $\rm m_{\oplus}$ the growth time of a significant atmosphere for a planet exceeds the lifetime of protoplanetary discs, i.e. is not possible).
I ...
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Binary stars are usually in stable orbits due to energy conservation: since they do not lose energy, they stay in the same orbit. What can happen over their lifespan is that one of them becomes a red giant and the extended atmosphere transfers mass to the other, changing their orbits, or (more importantly for this question) that tidal forces and gas drag in ...
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