Max Charles

Image Reconstruction with the James Webb Interferometer

Rotating protoplanetary disks encircling young stars form the nursery for newborn exoplanets as they coalesce by accretion of the disk material. However, many aspects of the astrophysics of exoplanet formation remain elusive, due in large part to the difficulty of imaging structures at the required scales embedded in remote, dusty environments. The Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) in the NIRISS instrument flying onboard the James Webb Space Telescope is capable of imaging at the required spatial scales while yielding high fidelity measurements due to the cold, stable platform free from atmospheric turbulence. AMI has recovered hitherto unseen structures within protoplanetary disk systems, such as PDS-70: a known host of three exoplanets. This paper presents the development of a novel maximum-likelihood regularised image deconvolution pipeline for AMI, created with AMIGO; the jax-based differentiable optical model of AMI developed by our Sydney-based team. Here we present these innovative codes illustrated with outcomes from JWST imagery of protoplanetary disk systems and other celestial objects.