TITLE: "The Transits of Extra-solar Planets"

SPEAKER: Professor Joshua Winn, MIT

Thursday 2009 February 26, 3:00 pm colloquium
NASA Ames Building N245 Auditorium


ABSTRACT:

The transit of a planet across the disk of its parent star is a rare
and enlightening event.  For a generic exoplanet discivered by the
radial velocity technique, all that is known are its orbital
characteristics and its minimum mass.  For a transiting planet we
can also learn the actual mass, radius, temperature, and much more.
I will discuss the present and future of transit observations,
concentrating on recent efforts to measure planetary radii,
spin-orbit alignment, and reflected light from exoplanets.


BIOGRAPHY:

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 as an Assistant Professor
of Physics in January 2006.