Across the Universe: Frequently Asked Questions
This column first appeared in The Tablet in November 2015
One of my tasks as the new [as of 2015] director of the Vatican Observatory is answering requests for interviews. They ask all the usual questions; of course, as any good teacher knows, the questions we get over and over are the ones we didn’t answer well the first time. But they also ask me some more interesting questions, as well. Here’s a sampling:
Why does the Vatican have an astronomer?
My role is to remind the general public, including members of the church, that our religion embraces good science.
Why are you doing astronomy when there are people starving in the world?
I learned the answer to that when I served in the US Peace Corps. When my African students learned I was an astronomer, they wanted to look through my little telescope and have the same joy in discovering the universe that I had. They, too, had an insatiable hunger to know about the universe. They reminded me: it’s not enough to feed the body; we also have to feed the soul.
Has the Vatican Observatory’s telescope in Arizona made any important discoveries?
Relatively small telescopes like ours are an important link in the chain of scientific discovery.
We can afford to spend the many hours it takes, often over years, to check out an idea and see if it works. So we’ve done surveys looking for color patterns in trans-neptunian asteroids, looking for massive compact halo objects around the Andromeda galaxy, looking for patterns in stars with peculiar spectra… I could reel off another dozen such programs.
None of them are the big discoveries that you’d find reported in the newspapers. But I don’t trust those sorts of discoveries; half the time the science you read about in the newspapers turns out to be… not quite right. Science is not done by breakthroughs, but by steady work, accumulating data, finding the jigsaw puzzle pieces and then assembling them, slowly, one piece at a time, until the whole picture becomes a little clearer.
Does astronomy support, or threaten, religion?
In science I get to know, intimately, God’s creation; it is a way of getting to know God. Anyone who feels that their faith is threatened by science, has no faith in their faith. And anyone who thinks their knowledge of God is perfect and complete already, also has a pretty poor idea of God!
Why are most scientists atheists?
You must have spoken to more scientists than I have! Gregor Mendel, who came up with the rules of genetics, was a monk; Georges Lemaitre, a priest, first devised the Big Bang theory… Besides, to be an atheist one must have a clear idea of the god one does not believe in. Most gods, I don’t believe in, either. I only believe in one more God than Stephen Hawking.
If God made everything, why do we need science?
There’s a difference between an ultimate cause and a proximate cause. God is the ultimate source for the universe exists with all its laws. But He is not one law alongside the others within the universe… it’s wrong to say, “gravity did this, electricity did that, God did this other thing…”
Dr. Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute (in Tucson, Arizona) maintains that the dazzling light seen by St. Paul on the road to Damascus was a falling meteor!
Bill Hartmann is a good friend of mine, with a very creative imagination. But if every falling meteorite led to a religious conversion, we’d be swamped with saints. Which is too bad… we could use a few more saints.
In response to a common question:
“Has the Vatican Observatory’s telescope in Arizona made any important discoveries?”
Why not study ‘Oumuamua or its interstellar sister objects
traveling within the orbit of the Earth several times per year?
‘Oumuamua has a rotation period of 8.1 hours,
similar to Kuiper Belt objects
implying a common origin
in the vast depths of interstellar/intergalactic space, but it’s hardly
implausible that some bodies originating in different places might
have roughly similar rotation periods.
Arthur C. Clarke, envisioned a long cylindrical metal
‘Hindu Rama’ entering our solar system with a four minute period (much too short).
Arthur may have liked the analogy to Rama
in the Hawaiian name ‘Oumuamua
-“reflecting the way this object
is like a scout or messenger sent
from the distant past to reach out to us”
Apparently several of these interstellar objects
travel within the orbit of the Earth several times per year,
thus providing possible opportunities for study.
In the mean time it interesting to note
that a similar ~8 hour time period
has been observed from separate perspectives:
1. Kuiper Belt object rotations
2. Asteroid rotations (not as good a correlation due to collisions
possibly modifying their original 8 hr periods)
3. Lisa Pathfinder accelerometer oscillations (1/8 hrs)
(A Machian oscillating universe)
4. Gravity Probe B anomalous gyro oscillations (1/8 hrs)
5. Solar oscillations (1/8 hrs)
6. Distant stellar oscillation observed by the Planck space craft
7. Several thousand RRC stars with 8 hr oscillation periods
8. The 8 hr period is dimensionally linked to a trinitarian space time
at the quantum level.
This data all point to a possible inherent property
of interstellar/intergalactic space.
Such a coherent space property (nu~1/8 hrs)
would necessarily define an extremely low temperature(T).
T = h x nu/k ~ 10^-16 K
This extremely low temperature(T) would provide a ‘dark energy’ milieu in thermal equilibrium with dark matter.
The Vatican Observatory’s aplanatic Gregorian, f/9 telescope capabilities in Arizona appear to be directly applicable to tracking the multiple interstellar objects(similar to ‘Oumuamua) and their rotations within the orbit of the Earth to test this hypothesis.
This tedious but disciplined work obtaining 8+ hour light curves compares to watch paint dry, but surely it is extremely important.
Many of those rotation rates for Kuiper Belt Objects that you cite were in fact observed at the VATT. However, our telescope at 1.8 meters aperture is far too small to be able to make useful measurements of ‘Oumuamua… the faintest we can detect is about 22nd magnitude, two magnitudes brighter than this object was… and it’s far fainter now!
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