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.
