Faculty

JOSHUA WINN
Class of 1942 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics

XIAO-GANG WEN, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics

Name: Joshua N. Winn

Title(s): Class of 1942 Career Development Associate Professor of
Physics

Email: jwinn@mit.edu

Phone: (617) 258.5928

Assistant: Thea Paneth (617) 253-3718

Address:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Bldg. 37-664B
Cambridge, MA 02139

Related Links:

Area of Physics:

Astrophysics: Stars, Planets, Optical Observations

Research Interests

Prof. Winn's research goals are to explore the properties of planets around other stars ("exoplanets"), to understand how planets form and evolve, and to make progress on the age-old question of whether there are other planets capable of supporting life. His group uses optical and infrared telescopes to study exoplanetary systems, especially those in which the star and planet eclipse one another. He is a Participating Scientist in the NASA Kepler mission, and Project Scientist of a proposed successor mission called the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. Over the years, his group has also pursued topics in stellar astronomy, planetary dynamics, radio interferometry, and gravitational lensing.

Biographical Sketch

Josh Winn is from Deerfield, Illinois. He graduated from MIT in 1994 with S.B. and S.M. degrees in physics. After spending a year as a Fulbright Scholar in the UK, at Cambridge University, he returned to MIT as a Hertz Fellow. While in graduate school, he worked in medical physics, condensed-matter physics, and astrophysics, and wrote for the science section of The Economist. He earned a Ph.D. in physics in 2001, and subsequently held NSF and NASA postdoctoral fellowships at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He joined the MIT faculty in January 2006.

Selected Publications

  • "Spin-Orbit alignment for the circumbinary planet host Kepler-16A", Astrophysical Journal (Letters), J.N. Winn et al., in press [arxiv:1109.3198]
  • "A transiting super-Earth around a naked-eye star," Astrophysical
    Journal (Letters), J.N. Winn et al., 737, 18 (2011),
  • "Hot stars with hot Jupiters have high obliquities," Astrophysical Journal (Letters), J.N. Winn, D. Fabrycky, S. Albrecht, J.A. Johnson, 718, 145 (2010).
  • "HAT-P-7: A retrograde or polar orbit, and a third body," Astrophysical Journal (Letters), J.N. Winn, J.A. Johnson, S. Albrecht, A.W. Howard, G.W. Marcy, I.J. Crossfield, M.J. Holman, 703, 99 (2009).
  • "Misaligned spin and orbital axes cause the anomalous precession of DI Herculis," S. Albrecht, S. Reffert, I.A.G. Snellen, J.N. Winn, Nature, 461, 373 (2009).
  • "The Transit Light Curve Project. XI. Submillimagnitude photometry of two transits of the bloated planet WASP-4b," J.N. Winn, M.J. Holman, J.A. Carter, G. Torres, D.J. Osip, T. Beatty, Astronomical Journal, 137, 3826 (2009).

    • Some Older Publications

  • "Measurement of Spin-Orbit Alignment in an Extrasolar Planetary System," J.N. Winn, R.W. Noyes, M.J. Holman, D. Charbonneau, Y. Ohta, A. Taruya, Y. Suto, N. Narita, E.L. Turner, J.A. Johnson, G.W. Marcy, R.P. Butler, and S.S. Vogt, Astrophysical Journal, 631, 1215 (2005).
  • "KH 15D: Gradual Occultation of a Pre-Main-Sequence Binary," J.N. Winn, M.J. Holman, J.A. Johnson, K.Z. Stanek, and P.M. Garnavich, Astrophysical Journal (Letters), 603, 45 (2004).
  • "The Central Image of a Gravitationally Lensed Quasar," J.N. Winn, D. Rusin, and C.S. Kochanek, Nature, 427, 613 (2004).
  • "Omnidirectional Reflection from a One-Dimensional Photonic Crystal," J.N. Winn, Y. Fink, S. Fan, and J.D. Joannopoulos, Optics Letters, 23, 1573 (1998).