Don Winget

Dr. Winget has an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Illinois, and a master's degree and Ph.D. in physics and astronomy from the University of Rochester. Don is the Harlan J. Smith Centennial Professor of Astronomy and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor.  In 1982, during his first year at The Unversity of Texas, Don predicted and discovered a new class of pulsating variable stars.  This was the first time in the 300-year-old field of pulsating variable stars that anyone had predicted a new class of pulsating variable stars before their discovery.  In 1985, he made the first direct measurement of stellar evolution.  In 1987, Don developed a new method for measuring the age and assembly history of the Galaxy, currently the most accurate method for dating the stellar components of the galaxy.  He co-founded, with Prof. R. E. Nather, the Whole Earth Telescope (W.E.T.), which uses a network of the major optical observatories around the planet working together to defeat dawn: the sun never rises on the Whole Earth Telescope.  Don and his research group use their observations of pulsating white dwarfs to do extreme physics, constraining masses of theoretically proposed particles - such as axions and plasmon neutrinos.  This work will help explore the physcial nature of dark matter.  Don and his collaborators have used the Hubble Space Telescope observations of globular clusters to demonstrate that the dense Coulomb plasma in white dwarf stars crystallizes and releases latent heat in the process.  He is currently involved in a project at Sandia National Laboratories to reproduce the conditions at the surfaces of white dwarf stars in the laboratory, thereby dramatically improving our understanding of these fundamental stellar objects.

Professor Winget has diverse avenues of research, ranging from the physics of matter at high temperatures and densities to galactic structure and cosmochronology, intersected with the study of white dwarf stars. He exploits the intrinsic simplicity of these high gravity objects by applying the powerful theoretical machinery of asteroseismology to determine many of the fundamental structural and evolutionary parameters of white dwarf stars; rotation rates, magnetic field strengths, total mass, compositional stratification of the envelope, core composition, and more. Professor Winget uses this information to study the behavior of matter under extreme conditions, to explore the history and population of our galaxy, and constrain the nature of weakly interacting particles as dark matter candidates. He's searching for planetary systems around pulsating white dwarf stars. This search will yield planetary systems dynamically similar to our own solar system.