Granulation in Color: The Chromatic Stellar Flicker of LTT-9779 and WASP-121
astro-ph.SR, astro-ph.EP
Submitted: 2026-10-17
Updated: 2026-10-17
Comments: 14 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to A&A
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Granulation is a persistent feature of stars with outer convective layers and is the photospheric signature of near-surface convective energy transport.
Abstract
Granulation is a persistent feature of stars with outer convective layers and is the photospheric signature of near-surface convective energy transport. In disk-integrated observations, it produces stochastic brightness variations that contribute substantially to stellar variability on timescales of minutes to hours. High-precision, observations with JWST provide an opportunity to study the chromatic signatures of stellar granulation. This work aims to measure the amplitude and characteristic timescale of granulation-induced variability for solar-type stars and to investigate whether the granulation signal shows significant chromatic variation in the near-infrared. We accessed publicly available JWST/NIRISS SOSS time-series observations of LTT-9779 (G7V) and WASP-121 (F6V) and de-trended the light curves by fitting the transits, eclipses, and planetary phase curves. We computed power spectra from the de-trended light curves and fit them with a Harvey granulation profile. We first analyzed the broadband light curves to measure and fix the granulation timescale and then repeated the power-spectrum analysis in individual wavelength channels to measure the chromatic dependence of the granulation amplitude. For LTT-9779, we measure a broadband granulation amplitude of σ =53.8+4.1-4.0 ppm at a timescale of τ =4.8+1.5-1.3 min. For WASP-121, we measure σ =59.3 plus or minus4.3 ppm and τ =6.3+2.1-1.8 min. We also measure peak oscillation frequencies of ν =3382+166-191μ Hz and 1649+55-69μ Hz in the bandpass-integrated power spectra of LTT-9779 and WASP-121, respectively. In the spectroscopic fits, we find σ decreases with wavelength. Our results demonstrate a new observational window on short-timescale stellar variability and provides a way to characterize chromatic stellar noise in transit light curves.
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