Chat With Exoplanet Guru Geoff Marcy

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Source:  Lisa Grossman, Wired Science
 Excerpt: ...astronomer Geoff Marcy ...now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his team went on to discover 70 of the first 100 exoplanets, pioneering techniques subsequently used to find and describe more than 400 planets — and counting.... Wired.com: Why exoplanets? You started back when there weren’t any. How did you get into this? Geoff Marcy: You want the real answer? It’s personal. ..my research wasn’t going very well. A Harvard astronomer criticized my PhD thesis. ... I thought okay, well now the jig is up. Maybe my career is over.  ...I remember ... thinking, I can’t suffer like this anymore. I’ve got to just enjoy myself, do research that really means something to me. So I thought, what do I care about? I would love to know if there were other planets around other stars.... 

 www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/02/geoff-marcy-qa/

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