Gillett was born on February 7, 1937, in
Minot, North Dakota. He studied at the
University of Minnesota, receiving a
bachelor of science in
physics in 1960. In 1960 he also married Marian Ruth DeGriselles, a
registered nurse. As a graduate student at the university he took an interest in the new field of infrared astronomy, under the guidance of his
doctoral advisor Edward P. Ney. Gillett travelled to
Tucson, Arizona to use
Frank Low's new
infrared detector, a
bolometer. With Low, he designed and built the first
spectrometer that could measure
infrared radiation with wavelengths of 8–14μm. He was awarded a Ph.D. in physics in 1966, one of the first doctorates awarded for infrared astronomy. This was the first discovered example of the now widely observed phenomenon known as
unidentified infrared emission (UIE) bands. The exact causes of these emissions remain unidentified. In 1973 he moved to
Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) in
Arizona where he introduced infrared instrumentation to the observatory. The project helped open up access to military infrared detector technology that had until then been classified. The Vega phenomenon, as it became known, provided the first solid evidence that
planet formation occurs outside of the
Solar System. In 1987 Gillett took a two-year
sabbatical to be a visiting senior scientist in the Office of Space Science at
NASA's headquarters in
Washington, D.C. The wide
main belt asteroid
74509 Gillett is named in his honor. == References ==