Keep constant. A circular circumstellar orbit stays circular in the secular drag approximation, and integrates to . The inspiral time under Poynting–Robertson drag to the stellar surface is
The final expression treats the star as a point, or assumes .
For the coplanar circumplanetary orbit used in the preceding result, , so . The inspiral time of circumplanetary dust to the planet's surface, for , is
Thus the timescales have the same dependence on stellar flux and , but planetary arrival contains a logarithm of the initial planetocentric radius. It is not always shorter: for a point star, only if . A constant tilted-orbit average replaces three by its appropriate orientation coefficient. Sublimation or other removal can terminate the evolution before either idealized arrival time.