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The Search for Exoplanets

Dr. Dawn Gelino
Dr. Dawn Gelino

We're joined by Dr. Dawn Gelino, she’s Deputy Director of the Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. She’s on campus today for a Whitaker Center STEMinar called “Working Together Works Better: NASA's NExSS Initiative to Search for Life in the Universe.” It’s this afternoon at 3:30 in Reed Hall.

 

An exoplanet is a planet that’s orbiting a star other than our sun. While it might seem obvious that at least some stars outside of our solar system would have planets orbiting around them, scientific evidence proving their existence was not discovered until the late 1980s. Since that first discovery, though, scientists have discovered more than 37-hundred exoplanets in almost 28-hundred systems.

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RachelIacovoneis a reporter and associate producer ofGulf Coast LiveforWGCU News. Rachel came toWGCU as an intern in 2016, during the presidential race. She went on to cover Florida Gulf Coast University students at President Donald Trump's inauguration on Capitol Hill and Southwest Floridians in attendance at the following day's Women's March on Washington.
Mike Kiniry is producer of Gulf Coast Live, and co-creator and host of the WGCU podcast Three Song Stories: Biography Through Music. He first joined the WGCU team in the summer of 2003 as an intern while studying Communication at Florida Gulf Coast University.
Julie Glenn is the host of Gulf Coast Live. She has been working in southwest Florida as a freelance writer since 2007, most recently as a regular columnist for the Naples Daily News. She began her broadcasting career in 1993 as a reporter/anchor/producer for a local CBS affiliate in Quincy, Illinois. After also working for the NBC affiliate, she decided to move to Parma, Italy where she earned her Master’s degree in communication from the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Her undergraduate degree in Mass Communication is from the University of Missouri at Kansas City.