arXiv subjects

Shashank Dholakia

Publications and source records attributed to Shashank Dholakia.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Atmospheric asymmetries in WASP-121 b revealed by rotational transits detected with JWST

Close-in exoplanets are tidally locked to their host star and thus exhibit extreme atmospheric temperature gradients. It has been theorized that the fraction of star light absorbed by such planets during transit changes as a function of orbital phase as progressively hotter or colder atmospheric gas rotates into view, but this effect has not been observed so far. Here, we show that two transits of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-121 b, acquired with JWST/NIRSpec and NIRISS, exhibit asymmetric transit light curves caused by the planet's rotation during transit. We observe increasing CO absorption and slightly decreasing H$_2$O absorption in the transmission spectrum, as the planet rotates. These results are indicative of a stronger longitudinal temperature gradient across the evening than across the morning terminator, consistent with higher temperatures in the eastern half than in the western half of the dayside. The observed changes of the transmission spectrum with orbital phase are in line with the temperature increase causing thermal dissociation of H$_2$O, while CO remains abundant. The observation of longitudinal gradients of atmospheric temperature and chemistry from the planet's rotational transit provides a new probe for constraining atmospheric heterogeneity using JWST beyond differences between morning and evening terminators from limb asymmetries.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2026

Calibration of an Analog-to-Digital Conversion Nonlinearity in JWST/NIRISS

We quantify an unusual flux-dependent systematic which is periodic in raw counts in flight data from the James Webb Space Telescope's Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (JWST/NIRISS), used extensively for exoplanet imaging and spectroscopy. Originally discovered in the aperture masking interferometry (AMI) mode, it also manifests in the Single Object Slitless Spectroscopy (SOSS) mode with the same dominant period of 1024 in raw analog-to-digital units (ADU). The likely cause of the signal is an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) integral nonlinearity (INL) in which case it will apply to all observations taken with the NIRISS instrument. Fortunately, it is straightforward to correct the data in postprocessing. The periodic INL is shown to be flux-dependent, increasing in amplitude with higher pixel counts on the detector. We derive a model of this periodic INL by fitting a combination of a polynomial and sinusoid multiplied with the residuals of ramp fits to the uncalibrated data and find an amplitude of 125ppm, up to a 2.5-count shift for a pixel with 20,000ADU. We apply this model to correct the well-studied NIRISS SOSS Program ERS1366 dataset of WASP-39b and reduce the data into a transmission spectrum. We find that our corrected transmission spectrum removes the INL systematic from the uncorrected spectrum at the 30ppm level across both orders, and also corrects a 55ppm offset between Order 1 and Order 2. We recommend a larger scale data-driven calibration of the periodic INL and the adoption of the outcome into NIRISS data pipelines.

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arXiv2025

Analytic Interferometry of Rotating Stellar Surfaces

The surfaces of rotating stars serve as a window into their interiors, magnetic dynamos, and are important in other areas including exoplanet discovery and atmospheric characterization. While indirect techniques such as photometry and Doppler imaging have been studied for their ability to map stellar surfaces, the gold standard remains optical long-baseline interferometry. In this paper, we develop new closed-form solutions for the interferometric visibility of a rotating star with an arbitrary inhomogeneous surface. We introduce the concept of 'stellar rotation synthesis' in interferometry--an analog of Earth rotation synthesis--where stellar rotation adds information to the spherical harmonic modes representing the star's surface intensity. We implement these solutions in the open-source package harmonix, written in JAX with automatic differentiation, providing a rich ecosystem for fitting and inference. Inspired by similar studies for photometry and Doppler imaging, we use simulations of a fiducial star as observed by the CHARA Array and intensity interferometers to perform a comprehensive theoretical study of the information theory of the starspot mapping problem in interferometry. We show that adding simultaneous photometry from a space-based instrument such as TESS adds complementary spatial information to interferometry and can improve the precision on the map coefficients by over an order of magnitude, enabling the detailed mapping of nearby main-sequence stars with current facilities. Finally, we evaluate the performance of existing and proposed intensity interferometers for stellar surface mapping.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2025

The Serpent Eating Its Own Tail: Dust Destruction in the Apep Colliding-Wind Nebula

Much of the carbonaceous dust observed in the early universe may originate from colliding wind binaries (CWBs) hosting hot, luminous Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars. Downstream of the shock between the stellar winds there exists a suitable environment for dust grain formation, and the orbital motion of the stars wraps this dust into richly structured spiral geometries. The Apep system is the most extreme WR-CWB in our Milky Way: two WR stars produce a complex spiral dust nebula, whose slow expansion has been linked to a gamma-ray burst progenitor. It has been unclear whether the O-type supergiant 0.7" distant from the WR+WR binary is physically associated with the system, and whether it affects the dusty nebula. Multi-epoch VLT/VISIR and JWST/MIRI observations show that this northern companion star routinely carves a cavity in the dust nebula - the first time such an effect has been observed in a CWB - which unambiguously associates the O star as a bound component to the Apep system. These observations are used together with a new geometric model to infer the cavity geometry and the orbit of the WR+WR binary, yielding the first strong constraints on wind and orbital parameters. We confirm an orbital period of over 190 years for the inner binary - nearly an order of magnitude longer than the next longest period dust-producing WR-CWB. This, together with the confirmed classification as a hierarchical triple, cements Apep as a singular astrophysical laboratory for studying colliding winds and the terminal life stages of the most massive star systems.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2024

A General, Differentiable Transit Model for Ellipsoidal Occulters: Derivation, Application, and Forecast of Planetary Oblateness and Obliquity Constraints with JWST

Increasingly precise space-based photometry uncovers higher-order effects in transits, eclipses and phase curves which can be used to characterize exoplanets in novel ways. The subtle signature induced by a rotationally deformed exoplanet is determined by the planet's oblateness and rotational obliquity, which provide a wealth of information about a planet's formation, internal structure, and dynamical history. However, these quantities are often strongly degenerate and require sophisticated methods to convincingly constrain. We develop a new semi-analytic model for an ellipsoidal object occulting a spherical body with arbitrary surface maps expressed in terms of spherical harmonics. We implement this model in an open-source Jax-based Python package eclipsoid, allowing just-in-time compilation and automatic differentiation. We then estimate the precision obtainable with JWST observations of the long period planet population and demonstrate the best current candidates for studies of oblateness and obliquity. We test our method on the JWST NIRSpec transit of the inflated warm Neptune WASP-107 b and place an upper bound on its projected oblateness $f<0.23$, which corresponds to a rotation period of $P_{\mathrm{rot}}>13$h if the planet is not inclined to our line of sight. Further studies of long-period exoplanets will necessitate discarding the assumption of planets as spherical bodies. Eclipsoid provides a general framework allowing rotational deformation to be modelled in transits, occultations, phase curves, transmission spectra and more.

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arXiv2021

Efficient and precise transit light curves for rapidly-rotating, oblate stars

We derive solutions to transit light curves of exoplanets orbiting rapidly-rotating stars. These stars exhibit significant oblateness and gravity darkening, a phenomenon where the poles of the star have a higher temperature and luminosity than the equator. Light curves for exoplanets transiting these stars can exhibit deviations from those of slowly-rotating stars, even displaying significantly asymmetric transits depending on the system's spin-orbit angle. As such, these phenomena can be used as a protractor to measure the spin-orbit alignment of the system. In this paper, we introduce a novel semi-analytic method for generating model light curves for gravity-darkened and oblate stars with transiting exoplanets. We implement the model within the code package starry and demonstrate several orders of magnitude improvement in speed and precision over existing methods. We test the model on a TESS light curve of WASP-33, whose host star displays rapid rotation ($v \sin i_* = 86.4$ km/s). We subtract the host's $\delta$-Scuti pulsations from the light curve, finding an asymmetric transit characteristic of gravity darkening. We find the projected spin orbit angle is consistent with Doppler tomography and constrain the true spin-orbit angle of the system as $\varphi=108.3^{+19.0}_{-15.4}$~$^{\circ}$. We demonstrate the method's uses in constraining spin-orbit inclinations of such systems photometrically with posterior inference. Lastly, we note the use of such a method for inferring the dynamical history of thousands of such systems discovered by TESS.

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