Mass deposition profile (ablated mass per unit length) as a function of height for 100 km planetesimals (solid blue line). The brown dash-dotted line is the mass deposition for 1 km planetesimals, multiplied by a factor 10⁶, while the green dashed line shows the result for 10 m planetesimals, multiplied by a factor 10¹², so that the total mass deposited is identical in the three cases. The gray vertical lines show the radius where the envelope temperature becomes so high that silicate grains evaporate (“evap”) and where the molecular opacities alone become larger than the opacity due to dust in the deep deposition case (“κ-DG”). The steps in the right part of the lines are a numerical artifact without physical meaning.