When a planet approaches its star to a critical distance, tidal forces, the result of a sharp gradient in gravity between the near and far sides of the celestial body, tear it apart. This process ignites a cosmic funeral pyre: the planet's debris forms a glowing accretion disk around the star. Scientists simulated the demise of exoplanets around other stars using computational hydrodynamics and tracked how the brightness of such flares changes over time. It turned out that the shape of the orbit dictates the destruction scenario. For a giant planet like Jupiter on a circular orbit, the pyre builds up gradually over 12 days; on an elongated, elliptical orbit, the flare occurs rapidly, in just one day, but its light is unstable: it flickers. For Neptune-class planets, the picture is reversed: on an elongated orbit, the ignition slows down, stretching over time. The color of the radiation serves as a temperature indicator: the brighter the flare, the bluer its hue, much like how heated metal changes color from red to white and blue as it gets hotter. After the main event, the gas-and-dust cloud left over from the planet continues to smolder for years, slowly cooling. An unexpected conclusion from the simulations: if this happened at Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us, we could see the funeral pyre with the naked eye, so bright would the event be. Now astronomers plan to deliberately search for such flares in observational data: they are beacons marking the death of worlds.