Transit depth (top panel) and maximum tail height (extent from the planet’s orbital plane; bottom panel) as a function of meta-particle ejection velocity. The meta-particles were ejected with a spherically symmetric distribution from a planet of mass 0.02 M_⊕ and radius of0.3 R_⊕. After the tail was simulated, the dust mass was scaled to the arbitrary large value of 1.2 × 10¹⁶ kg to ensure that the tail was optically thick. The vertical dotted line is the surface escape velocity. The blue dash-dotted line is the maximum height that tail meta-particles could attain if they were not decelerated in the vertical direction (perpendicular to the planet’s orbital plane) by the planet’s gravity. The dashed red line is the maximum height that tail meta-particles could attain if their vertical velocity were decelerated by the planet’s gravity for the time it takes the meta-particles to radially move beyond the planet’s Hill sphere, after being accelerated by the centrifugal acceleration (consideringthe co-rotating reference frame).