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Br. Guy Consolmagno

About Br. Guy Consolmagno

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.

Orbit of Asteroid 4597 Consolmagno

Across the Universe: Words that Change Reality

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This entry is part 37 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

My columns for The Tablet often act as a diary of sorts, recording important events in science or in my own life. Such is this column, which first ran in September, 2006. We first ran it here in 2015. Ten years ago last month [as of 2006 – now 23 years ago!], Dave McKay and his colleagues at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston announced that a meteorite, believed to have come from Mars, showed evidence of microbial life. Their interpretations are still widely disputed by the meteoritics community. But, oddly, their announcement resulted in one major change of attitudes. Before, there were still skeptics who were not sure that those rocks came from Mars; now, as the skeptics argue about the putative biogenic grains found in it, no one doubts the Martian origin anymore! Some of us can only be skeptical of one thing at a time, I guess. Still, what you call the meteorite doesn’t really change its … Continue reading →

ⓜ Million Miles Away… Diary of 8 September, 2019

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The Irish blues singer Rory Gallagher… the last Star Wars movie… the discovery of pulsars… the Dean of York Cathedral… and Pope Francis. That pretty much summarizes my diary for August. Oh, you want to hear more, you say? But first, our stats: As of today, we have 139 paid subscribers… that’s only one more than last month. On the other hand, there are 9051 people who get notified of new postings, a jump of nearly 200 compared to last month. We continue to grow, but not nearly fast enough to keep us in business. We pay our writers (a pittance, but still it’s something) and the web site and its support does not come for free. Please tell more people about our site. And if you can, please subscribe at a rate of $10 a month (that’s two visits to Subway for me) or $100 per year. And tell your friends about the site. If we could double the size … Continue reading →

What happens at a Vatican Observatory Summer School?

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It’s back to school time in the northern hemisphere, and at the Vatican Observatory we’re both celebrating our summer schools past and letting the world know about our Summer School, Future! First, some information about the upcoming summer school. It’s called the VOSS (for Vatican Observatory Summer School.) It runs for four weeks. It is open to students from around the world who are in the last years of their undergraduate or opening years of graduate studies in astronomy or astrophysics; it is held at our headquarters in Castel Gandolfo; it features a world class teaching staff (more about them, below); and it’s free. (If you can afford it, we ask you to pay some part of the cost of travel and housing; if you can’t, we cover it.) There are two restrictions on who gets to attend. First, we only want students who intend to continue in a career in astronomy. This is not for anyone who already has … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Relics of Space

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This entry is part of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet first ran there in September 2018… I have altered it slightly to bring it up to date. The famous American cynic H. L. Mencken once asserted that every question had an answer that was “neat, plausible, and wrong.” Science is no different. Our meteorite collections have reddish “ordinary” meteorites and black “carbonaceous” ones; meanwhile, in space we see some asteroids with reddish surfaces, while others are pitch black. The connection between the meteorites and the asteroids is thus neat and plausible. But is it right? The holy grail in asteroids is finding the ones with water and carbon. If we are going to be a space-faring species, we’ll need those chemicals to feed us and power our spacecraft. The cost to bring them up to space with us from Earth makes these materials far more valuable than platinum or gold.  We know that some carbonaceous meteorites have carbon and water; and they are distinctively black. … Continue reading →

Own your own space-time continuum!

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This entry is part 45 of 45 in the series Diary

So, last week Pope Francis met in a private audience with the sixteen members of the Vatican Observatory. We presented the Pope with the published proceedings of a recent workshop we’d held on Gravitation and Black Holes — how we understand the fabric of space and time warped together in the deepest regions of space. That meeting had included Nobel Prize winners and other notables from the field; the Pope had met them, too. But another gift that we gave the Pope tells a deeper story. We also offered him a copy of our 2020 astronomical calendar. Every year, the Vatican Observatory Foundation publishes a calendar full of glorious astronomical images and marking significant dates in the history of our science. It’s a way of raising money to help support our telescope and our outreach efforts. But hundreds of these calendars are also given away, for free, to inmates in San Quentin and other prisons. All the prisoners have to do … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Clouds from Both Sides

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This entry is part 84 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in August 2010; we first ran it here in 2016. Saturday, seventeen hours from California, my friend Dan and I land in Australia. We’re looking forward to a week of observing southern stars, researching our latest book, a guide for amateur astronomers. Brother Ian meets us at the airport and leads us to the Jesuit winery and retreat house at Sevenhill, two hours north of Adelaide. Even jet-lag and a partly cloudy sky can’t stop us from pulling out our telescopes that night and peeking at Rigel Kentaurus, our Sun’s nearest neighbor, and Acrux, the brightest star of the Southern Cross. Both are double stars, first split by Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century.  After half an hour, the sky clouds over completely. But not to worry, we have the whole week before us. (A heat wave across North America threatens the lives of the poor and elderly.) Sunday, Ian shows us around the vineyards and … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Under the Southern Cross

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This entry is part 83 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in August, 2009; we first ran it here in 2016 Galaxies whirled before us, their curled spiral arms lit up like Christmas trees with bright infrared dots where young stars were being formed from interstellar clouds of gas and dust. Meanwhile, in their central bulges, streams of similar gas and dust were feeding the maws of  supermassive black holes, emitting high energy radiation in their death plunges. Looking at galaxies ever farther away in space, we could trace out ever further back in time the evolution of galactic clusters from filaments of matter shaped by energies we didn’t even know existed [twenty] years ago, which we must merely label as “dark”. We saw the swirling convection of a collapsing stellar core as modeled by a computer that almost, but not quite, reproduced the explosion of a supernova bursting as bright as any one of those galaxies. Not quite reproduced; because our models aren’t quite … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Martian Sunrise

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This entry is part 82 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in August, 2008; we first ran it here in 2016 A friend has a home on the western shore of Lake Huron, with a glorious view of the lake from her living room window. She tells how once she showed the sunrise over the lake through that window to her visiting four year old grandson. The boy took in the colorful display with rapt amazement. The next morning, she heard a shout from the living room. “Come quick, grandma!” cried the little boy. “It’s doing it again!” The [2008] discovery by the Phoenix spacecraft of ice in the Martian soil had all the inevitability of the sun rising yet again. But the scientists who found it were just as thrilled as that four year old boy. For thirty [now going on 40!] years we’ve known there must have been water on Mars. The spacecraft that orbited the planet in the 1970s sent back images … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Help My Unbelief

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This entry is part 34 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column was published in The Tablet in August, 2007, and first ran here in 2015 We believe in things we don’t see — like electrons, or black holes — because they let us make sense of things we do see. But sometimes we don’t believe, even when we see. The question of what we believe, and why we believe in it, struck me particularly at the [2007] annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society. A French mathematician has analyzed the dates meteorites have been seen to fall over the past 200 years and found clear trends, at the 90% confidence level: more meteorites than usual tend to fall every 3 years, every 10 years, and every 17 years. His analysis is standard, straightforward stuff; but I don’t believe it. Nor did anyone else in the audience. Two hundred years just doesn’t seem long enough to show such periodicities. And we’ve been burned before with theories that had only a 10% … Continue reading →

ⓜ The man who saw the origins of atheism: Diary of 2 August, 2019

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This entry is part 44 of 45 in the series Diary

It’s only been three weeks since our last roll call of subscribers, and since then we’ve added one and lost one; sadly, the one that is lost was an Andromeda subscriber, whom we will miss. We are still at 138 total. On the other hand, the number of folks who have signed up to be notified of new postings has jumped from 8776 to 8870, so that’s a healthy gain. I hope some of you will be inspired to support our work by subscribing, be it at the Pleiades, Hercules, or Andromeda levels! In July I had a couple of fun trips, first to Minneapolis for the Convergence science fiction convention (where I was a guest of honor) and then to the SciFoo techie “camp” hosted by Google, Nature, and O’Reilly the tech publishers. Old friends, new friends, fun talks, good food! Now I am back in Rome, and next Monday I’ll be off to Ireland, first for a vacation … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Solar Windjamming

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This entry is part 1 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet first ran in 2018. The pull of a magnet on a refrigerator is strong enough to hold up a child’s drawing; but move it just a fraction of an inch away and suddenly the tug between the fridge and the magnet is almost nothing. Planets have magnetic fields, too; Earth’s magnetic field points compass needles and gives us the auroras, or “northern lights”. But the strengths of planetary fields, too, drop quickly as you move away from the planet. Earth’s magnetic field doesn’t even reach to its own Moon. The Sun, however, has a magnetic field whose effect can be felt even at the Earth, and indeed out beyond the orbits of the outer planets. Magnetic storms on the Sun can affect our auroras, and occasionally interfere with cell phone and radio transmissions. How is that possible? It’s all connected to a phenomenon called the “solar wind”. The Sun is made mostly of hydrogen gas; … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Key to the Sea and Sky

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This entry is part 29 of 186 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in July 2007; we first ran it here in 2015.   In Alicante, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, a group of us planetary astronomers held a workshop [in 2007] on how asteroids respond to the massive collisions that can lead to their catastrophic disruption. Just north of us, in Valencia, sailors from Switzerland and New Zealand were vying for the America’s Cup. The connection between elegant million dollar yachts and exploding asteroids. is the equations of fluid dynamics. I’ve loved sailing since my childhood. I spent my summers capsizing sailboards on Lake Huron and my winters reading too much Arthur Ransome. As a student in the early 1970s I competed on MIT’s sailing team (the Charles River was indeed “dirty water” especially back then), and attended lectures in their ocean engineering department on the challenges of designing the best shape for a hull that could slip through the water with a minimum of friction while … Continue reading →