And that's why we get a kind of spiral-ish shape of salt blobs forming around the star. The gas around the star generally expands outwards, so the blobs that formed earlier along the circular orbit have since moved further out, resulting in the spiral.

Step 1 was to create a 3D reconstruction of the salt distribution. That's what you can see in this animation. The little yellow dot in the centre is the star, to scale, and the coloured blobs are the salt.

OK, I forgot it takes ~a day for things to appear on arXiv. In the meantime, here is a teaser animation.