Extended Data Fig. 4: Simulated WASP-39b transit light curves.
From: Magnetic origin of the discrepancy between stellar limb-darkening models and observations
The transit light curve at different wavelengths (600 nm, 1000 nm and 2000 nm in panels a, b, and c, respectively), calculated assuming different levels of WASP-39 atmospheric magnetization. Differences to non-magnetic (HD) calculations (panels d, e, and f at the corresponding wavelengths). Shown are small-scale dynamo (SSD; blue curve) simulations representing the minimum possible level of magnetic activity as well as fully relaxed simulations with a superposed initial vertical magnetic field of 100 G (orange), 200 G (green), and 300 G (red). The error bars shown in the right-hand side of the bottom panels are taken from Rustamkulov et al.14. The larger error bar is the WASP-39b noise from NIRSpec PRISM at the wavelength in our panels (at a bin width of about 0.5%). The smaller error bars are for transit curves averaged over 500-nm bins. The takeaway is that the change in stellar limb darkening due to surface magnetic fields is discernible with the JWST precision.
