Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ is Director of the the Vatican Observatory and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. A native of Detroit, Michigan, he earned undergraduate and masters' degrees from MIT, and a Ph. D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona; he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College before entering the Jesuits in 1989.
At the Vatican Observatory since 1993, his research explores connections between meteorites, asteroids, and the evolution of small solar system bodies, observing Kuiper Belt comets with the Vatican's 1.8 meter telescope in Arizona, and applying his measure of meteorite physical properties to understanding asteroid origins and structure. Along with more than 200 scientific publications, he is the author of a number of popular books including Turn Left at Orion (with Dan Davis), and most recently Would You Baptize an Extraterrestial? (with Father Paul Mueller, SJ). He also has hosted science programs for BBC Radio 4, been interviewed in numerous documentary films, appeared on The Colbert Report, and for more than ten years he has written a monthly science column for the British Catholic magazine, The Tablet.
Dr. Consolmagno's work has taken him to every continent on Earth; for example, in 1996 he spent six weeks collecting meteorites with a NASA team on the blue ice regions of East Antarctica. He has served on the governing boards of the Meteoritical Society; the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences (of which he was chair in 2006-2007); and IAU Commission 16 (Planets and Satellites). In 2000, the small bodies nomenclature committee of the IAU named an asteroid, 4597 Consolmagno, in recognition of his work. In 2014 he received the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences for excellence in public communication in planetary sciences.
(ⓜ = members only!) This week… some site statistics, a brief overview of the Faith and Astronomy Workshop, and how I met Bob Trembley… Bob Trembley… well, close. This is actually a Dacian bust found in the forum of the emperor Trajan, now in the Vatican Museums… I took this photo on a recent visit. In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such! … Continue reading →
First published in The Tablet in January, 2006; we ran it here in 2015. Thirty [now more than 40!] years ago, when I was a doctoral student at the University of Arizona, our campus in Tucson lay beneath the landing path of the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and every few minutes our planetary science classes would be interrupted by the roar of a jet fighter. But an occasional plane would cross overhead with a different sound… an odd, almost quiet whine. Looking up you’d see the large black cruciform, long straight wings and a thin fuselage, of a U-2 spy plane. For twenty years they’d flown photography missions over Soviet Russia and other cold war hotspots. But one U-2 was different. Rather than spooky black, it was painted pure white. And instead of air force emblems, it flew NASA insignia. A visitor to our Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Don Brownlee from the University of Washington, explained those flights to us. … Continue reading →
First published in The Tablet in January, 2005, just after the Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan. We ran it again here on January, 2015. This text is based on what I submitted, which was edited for length when it was printed. The most remarkable thing about the images from Saturn’s moon, Titan, which ESA’s Huygens probe has just sent us, is how “familiar” they look. They remind me of Nadar’s 19th century Collodion “wet plate” photographs taken from a balloon above Paris. Black and white, a bit fuzzy, these patterns of light and darkness can be grasped and processed by imagination and memory until we impose meaning on them. I picture myself floating through the clouds, gazing across at an intricate pattern of riverbeds cutting through rough light-colored mountains, flowing down to a flat, wine-dark sea. If these are riverbeds – and they certainly look like textbook examples of the many-branched “dendritic channels” made by rainfall flowing down hills … Continue reading →
We’ve been wondering how to get more Sacred Space members, and more members logging in… and one suggestion was to have “subscribers-only” posts available. But what to put in those posts? Over the next couple of months we’ll try out various kinds of content, to see which ones are most popular with our members. One genre which I will have here are “Diary” posts – “inside baseball” accounts of what’s happening at the Specola. This is my first attempt at such a post. In order to read the rest of this post, you have to be a paid-up member of Sacred Space, and logged in as such! … Continue reading →
This column first ran in The Tablet in January 2018 “What do you see when you look at the stars? Science, heaven, God?” the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire asked me in 2018. Does the sky look any different to a professional astronomer who is also a person of faith? The first thing I see when I look up at night is the beauty of the stars… just like anyone who can see the night sky. But I do see more. My father, a US Army Air Corps navigator who once guided a wing of American bombers across the Atlantic to England in 1942, taught me the brighter navigation stars when I was a child. I’d also been given a wonderful book by the children’s writer H. A. Rey (better known for Curious George) that taught the constellations by turning the stars into connect-the-dot puzzles. Even today, whenever I see the stars I immediately start to identify old friends by name. … Continue reading →
This column was first published in The Tablet in December, 2009 and here on 2015) In November and December of 2009, I was team-teaching a course called “Dynamic Evolution” at LeMoyne College, a small Jesuit university in Syracuse, New York. The biblical scholar from Leuven, Fr. Jan Lambrecht SJ, concentrated on the world-view of the New Testament in the first half of the course; my task was to bring the students forward through the cosmologies of the middle ages and the scientific revolution, to present day views on space and time: quantum theory and relativity. It’s been an exhausting journey. For many of the undergraduates, the shocking message has been how little we know for certain. After an academic path focused mostly on memorizing “facts” they must now come to the realization that everything they’ve been taught is, if not exactly wrong, then at least woefully incomplete. With everything we learn, we also learn how much more there is to know. Certainly, the world of … Continue reading →
Something I have come to understand, slowly but inevitably, is that astronomy is not about stars and planets; it is about people and how they (we) study those stars and planets. After all, one cannot understand the science of Galileo without knowing Galileo the person. He only was able to recognize what he saw in his telescope (he wasn’t the first to look) because he had an interest and training in art; he was only able to communicate it to the point that it led to a change in how humanity understood the situation (he wasn’t the first to try) because he had a passion for the Italian language and literature. If he had been a different person, our science would have had a different history… perhaps asking different questions, and accepting different answers as satisfactory. This blog has always been about people. And so I want to highlight someone here whose wonderful personality has been crucial to our success. … Continue reading →
(This column was first published in The Tablet, December 2004, and first run here at the Catholic Astronomer back in 2014, when we were very young…) Like everyone in the congregation that night, [many] years ago, I was struck by the sight of three of my fellow Jesuit community members from the Vatican Observatory on the altar at Midnight Mass: Fr. Sabino Maffeo, wise and vigorous looking even at his advanced age; Fr. Giuseppe Koch, with his wizard-like flowing white beard; and Fr. Jean-Baptiste Kikwaya, young, tall, and African. We astronomers had traveled from the east (all of ten kilometers, from Castel Gandolfo) to celebrate Christmas with the Jesuits at the Massimo High School in Rome. The echo was amusing, if obvious. Indeed during this season, ending at Epiphany with the arrival of the Three Wise Men, inevitably we astronomers asked about the Star of Bethlehem. What was the star? We don’t know. We weren’t there. There are plenty of … Continue reading →
This column first ran in The Tablet in December 2016 The day after the feast of St. Nicholas, I arrived in the Netherlands for a series of faith and science talks. My hosts put me up in a marvelously trendy hotel, featuring an exercise machine and a bathtub in the bedroom (no artificial walls between bed and bath!); two televisions (one for the bed, one for the bath); and a coffee machine so complicated I had to look up the instructions on the internet. If only it had a drawer to store my clothes, or a rack for my wet towel. This proliferation of useless toys brought to mind [the 2016] Pontifical Academy of Sciences program on sustainability. For several days we heard from a series of Nobel laureates the latest word on rising carbon dioxide levels, and the need for immediate strong government action. The final day was centered on the hope that genetically modified foods might improve the … Continue reading →
This has been a great year for the Vatican Observatory Foundation, in a lot of ways. We’ve made major upgrades to the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. We supported a fantastically successful Vatican Observatory Summer School, the 16th that we’ve run since the program began in 1986. The Jesuits and our adjunct astronomers have given hundreds of public talks and appeared in dozens of newspapers and media interviews. (I even got my picture on the front page of the New York Times!) Our Faith and Astronomy digital library is now up and running, at it has already attracted nearly 50,000 views. And the Catholic Astronomer website is now followed by more than 8,000 subscribers. In terms of supporting the scientific and educational work of the Vatican Observatory, we’ve never done more. The one downside? We are running seriously short in fundraising. How serious? Well… every year we make up a budget, and for 2018 we assumed that we’d be able to … Continue reading →
This column first ran in The Tablet in December 2015 One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity and changed the way we understand our universe. Newton had shown, 200 years earlier, that one could use mathematics (including his newly invented Calculus) to describe and even predict the way things in our physical universe move. But to do that, Newton had had to assume without definition the concepts of space, mass, and time. He had to assume that forces like gravity acted “at a distance”… Earth could pull on the Moon even if there’s nothing but this mystical “gravity” connecting them. Finally, he had to envision a playing field, the “inertial frame of reference”, where these forces could move those masses through space, over time. The whole genius of physics is to describe motion and change; but change, relative to what? Newton’s unmoving frame of reference was his answer. But was the Earth’s surface such a … Continue reading →
(This column first ran in the Tablet in November, 2005, and reran in 2015… it refers to a column I published here on the blog last month.) Waxing eloquent in a previous column, I referred to Lord Rosse’s giant 19-century telescope as “rightly called a leviathan, it boasted a mirror five feet in diameter set in a tube fifty feet long…” Except, of course, that I was wrong. It’s bigger: the mirror is 72 inches, or six feet, in diameter, and the tube is 54 feet long. It’s not the first mistake I’ve made in print, nor will it be the last. A small group of helpful readers e-mail me regularly with my errata, providing me with a regular dose of humility. In past columns I’ve been sloppy in the way I have defined “heliacal risings” and premature in what definitions of a planet the IAU will consider. My initial defensive reaction is to insist, “it doesn’t matter! Five feet or … Continue reading →
