Correction to: Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06573-9 Published online 11 October 2023

In the version of the article originally published, a sentence was missing from the end of the Methods. The final sentence now reads “After acceptance of this paper, Marshall et al. also reported the infrared brightening and optical dimming of ASASSN-21qj, using some of the same publicly available data. Marshall et al. concluded that the observation was consistent with stellar irradiation of a close-in debris disk associated with the breakup of exocometary bodies, similar to our scenario 2 above”; and cites the new reference: Marshall, J. P. et al. Sudden extreme obscuration of a sun-like main-sequence star: evolution of the circumstellar dust around ASASSN-21qj. Astrophys. J. 954, 140–150 (2023). This has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.