Signature of the atmospheric asymmetries of hot and ultra-hot Jupiters in light curves

¹ Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique, IPSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Université PSL, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, 75005 Paris, France
e-mail: aurelien.falco@lmd.ipsl.fr
² IPGP, Université Paris Cité, Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, CNRS, AIM, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
³ Laboratoire AIM, CEA, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, UVSQ, Université Paris-Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
⁴ Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, B18N, allée Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 33615 Pessac, France
⁵ Observatoire Astronomique de l’Université de Genève, département d’astronomie Chemin Pegasi 51, 1290 Versoix, Switzerland

Received: 7 December 2023
Accepted: 16 February 2024

Abstract

With the new generation of space telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), it is possible to better characterize the atmospheres of exoplanets. The atmospheres of Hot and ultra-hot Jupiters are highly heterogeneous and asymmetrical. The difference between the temperatures on the day and night sides is especially extreme in the case of ultra-hot Jupiters. We introduce a new tool to compute synthetic light curves from 3D general circulation model (GCM) simulations, developed in the Pytmosph3R framework. We show how rotation induces a variation in the flux during the transit that is a source of information on the chemical and thermal distribution of the atmosphere. We find that the day–night gradient linked to ultra-hot Jupiters has an effect close to stellar limb darkening, but opposite to tidal deformation. We confirm the impact of the atmospheric and chemical distribution on variations in the central transit time, though the variations found are smaller than those in available observational data, which could indicate that the east–west asymmetries are underestimated, due to the chemistry or clouds.