Rough Idea

To get a rough idea of what might happen, let's examine Ganymede around Jupiter in current and instantaneous Hill radii.

The Hill1 radius is given by

rH = (mplanet/ 3 mstar)1/3 a
where:
mplanet is the mass of the planet
mstar is the mass of the star
a is the orbital distance of the planet
3 is roughly 3

Clearly, the only part of this that changes is a.

1 - We'll see more of George Hill's work shortly.
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By John Weiss
Rendered Sunday 30 March 2003