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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.

Across the Universe: Seeing the Light

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This entry is part 22 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in April, 2007; we ran it here again in May, 2015 The e-mail came from the Fordham student who’s been working in the lab with me this term. “Some of the physics students have asked me to pass this on to you: they don’t want to admit it, but they’re totally lost.” There’s only a couple of weeks left of my sabbatical year at Fordham. I had asked the physics department if I could teach the class on electricity and magnetism; when I learned this material myself as an undergraduate, it had changed my life. I wanted the opportunity to pass the joy on to some of the brightest kids I’ve ever taught. They are totally lost? That’s no surprise; when I was a student, at this point I was lost too. The mathematics of electromagnetic fields has mystified science undergraduates even before Maxwell first summarized them with his famous equations. And the … Continue reading →

Five updates for one low price, May 20

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This entry is part 41 of 41 in the series Diary

It’s been well over a month since I last updated you on where we stand with the membership of this site… since then I had a wonderful trip to New Zealand (and Australia), where I gathered many memories… and, on the plane home, a nasty cold. Once I am over that I’ll post a longer (members only) diary. But for now, just to let you know… We launched our new site name and design; I hope you like it! As part of the design we don’t list the total “reach” anymore, but I know that continues to grow. As part of the new launch we mentioned that there is a donor willing to match new subscription and other donations up to $50,000 this year! And to that end, we have added five new donors, so thanks! We are up to 129 subscribers. (We can do more, of course; there must be a few more folks out there who will support … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Father of the Future

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This entry is part 185 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran at the end of May, 2018, in The Tablet. Why I wound up with two columns in May that year is mysterious to me… The summer of 2018 marked the 200th birthday of Father Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit priest often called the Father of Astrophysics. In May I participated in a celebration of his work held in his home town of Reggio Emilia, northern Italy. Speakers covered topics drawn from his life and career, starting with a wonderful biographical sketch by Ileana Chinnici, a historian of astronomy at the Palermo Observatory (and an adjunct Vatican astronomer).  Like Galileo, Secchi had a knack for the popularisation of science, and for becoming embroiled in political controversy. The revolutions of 1848 forced Secchi to flee Rome for two years – he spent the enforced sabbatical at Stonyhurst College and at Georgetown University – and he was nearly forced to leave again after 1870 by the manoeuvrings of enemies in the … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Patrolling the Final Frontier

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This entry is part 184 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in May 2018 Compared to the student riots and political assassinations of 1968, the United Nations Conference on the Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space that year caused relatively little stir. Back then, of course, only two nations were in any position to explore or use outer space. It was easy for the rest of the world to give lip service to the ideal that the space resources were the heritage of all humankind. Fifty years on, though, things are changing. In June, 2018, the UN’s Office of Outer Space Affairs held a fiftieth anniversary meeting: UNISPACE +50. To set the stage, the organizers decided to hold a small workshop where their diplomats could meet informally with scientists and engineers active in understanding how we’ll be using space resources, from satellite data to actual asteroid mining, in the near future. They asked the Vatican Permanent Mission to the UN for help organizing … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Dramatic Science

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This entry is part 64 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2008. We ran it here in 2016. From a glass-enclosed visitor’s gallery at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, I watched three technicians, encased in white suits, slowly affix bits of equipment to a large aluminum frame, the platform of an SUV-sized rover to Mars. Two sets of steering rockets were already attached; two large metal spheres painted black and gold were seated nearby. “Those are the fuel tanks, right?” I asked my friend Steve, an engineer on the project who guided my tour. “Like the ones that blew up the Mars Orbiter in the 1980s?” Every piece has a necessary function, and every piece has a history of what can happen if it goes wrong. Even with a recent string of triumphs, Mars probe failures still outnumber the successes. Each piece is added in a carefully scripted order, with a quality-control specialist looking on: the torque wrench must not overtighten … Continue reading →

Welcome to Sacred Space Astronomy!

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You may have noticed a change here… what we used to call The Catholic Astronomer is now Sacred Space Astronomy. And along with a change in layout and title, we’re expanding the way you can support our work. Why the name change? OK, so I admit, I am the guy who came up with the original name. I meant it as a pun, in the sense that “catholic” means “universal” and of course astronomers look at the universe, while our interests on this site cover pretty much the gamut from naked-eye stargazing to theoretical cosmology. All, of course, under the aegis of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. Well, like most puns, nearly everyone missed it entirely. And since a number of our contributors are not actual Catholics (again, there is a gamut, from practicing Jews to Catholic priests to non-churchgoers) the face value of the title wasn’t always appropriate. Meanwhile, for those of you who contribute financially to keep the site (and … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The Exploding Centaur

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This entry is part 21 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in April, 2006, and first published here in 2015. It was April Fool’s Day at the Vatican’s telescope in southeastern Arizona, and we’d had three nights of cloudy weather. This night looked promising, however. Bill Romanishin, our colleague at the University of Oklahoma, had given us a list of Kuiper Belt Objects to observe, orbiting out beyond Neptune. Included were some Centaurs, objects that some day might become comets plunging close to the Sun. At the telescope, I was with Steve Tegler from Northern Arizona University. Along with each object, we also observed bits of blank sky, so we could find and remove all the dust spots on the images; and fields of stars whose colours and brightnesses were already well known, so that we could calibrate our objects against these known standards. Around midnight, about halfway into a field of standard stars, Steve looked over his list again and remembered, “Oh, Bill wanted us … Continue reading →

ⓜ Adventures in traveling by train… Diary of 16 April, 2019

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This entry is part 40 of 41 in the series Diary

Travel news! I am in Tucson today; Here is where I have been, and where I will be going… More Stats: Since April 2 we’ve added 60 more people signed up to get notifications of these posts either via Twitter, Facebook, or directly asking for email updates here. And we’ve added two more paid subscribers, now up to 124. Thanks, and welcome! If we could double the size of the readership, would we double the number of supporters? It’s probably not that simple… but it would certainly help. More travels: I finished out my month in Italy with a trip to Padua, where I got to visit the historic astronomy tower of the University of Padua and the telescopes at the Asiago Observatory. But then, following a wonderful night train from Padua to Paris and the a high speed train to Brussels, I got to attend the historic unveiling of the first image of a Black Hole and celebration of the 100th … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Orbiting a New Sun

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This entry is part 20 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

Fourteen years ago this month, Pope John Paul II died and Pope Benedict XVI was elected. I wrote this column in reaction to those events; it appeared in the Tablet in April, 2005. We republished here in 2015, the tenth anniversary of the event. For twelve years [as of 2005] I have been an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory, one of a dozen Jesuits who are guests of the Pope at his summer home in Castel Gandolfo. And as an astronomer I observed John Paul II: occasionally in close encounters, more commonly from a distance… brief glances, an amplified voice resonating through the window of my room overlooking Wednesday audiences, Sunday Angelus prayers, and Mass for a thousand different groups of visitors. Our orbits rarely intersected. At Castel Gandolfo, our living quarters and offices are under the same roof as the Pope’s, but in fact our paths (like our hallways) rarely intersect. He’d have the Jesuits over for Mass on … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: An extraordinary, ordinary man

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This entry is part 180 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in March 2018 When the news agency of the Italian Bishops’ Conference asked me, as Vatican Observatory director, for a statement on the death of Stephen Hawking, I wrote: “Stephen Hawking… was a scientist of remarkable insight who even more remarkably gave a human face to the work of astronomical cosmology.”  The bishops translated my English into Italian, and issued a press release. That release was, in turn, picked up by American newspapers who turned their Italian back into English. Thus the Washington Post had me saying that Hawking was a “scientist of admirable intuition, who knew even more extraordinarily to give a human face to cosmology and to astronomy.” It’s close; but it’s not quite what I said.  This story illustrates a fundamental difficulty we always must face when trying to put human language, be it Italian or English or mathematics, to the task of describing the universe. We will always be … Continue reading →

ⓜ Diary of April 2, 2019

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This entry is part 39 of 41 in the series Diary

I really wanted to post more often here, but life got in the way… Some Stats: Here’s our latest monthly summary of statistics. As of this writing we have 8,405 people signed up to get notifications of these posts either via Twitter, Facebook, or directly asking for email updates here. As of a bit later in the month, last month, we had 8,336. And back then we had 120 paying members; we’ve added two more, and it nows stands at 122. Thanks, and welcome! If we could double the size of the readership, would we double the number of supporters? It’s probably not that simple… but it would certainly help. And what’s new: My travels first brought me to Rome for a month, where I immediately got on a train to a little village of Sarno, in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius, where I got an award and gave a talk supporting the Specola’s work in Faith and Science. I … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: False Economies

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This entry is part 59 of 184 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in March 2009, and first posted here in 2016 “Astronomers Are Just As Dumb As Economists” cried the headline on the “Business Insider” website. The author, Eric Falkenstein, who writes a blog on hedge funds and other mysteries of the universe, was reacting to an earlier editorial on the site which had complained of government officials who, they asserted, seemed to think that the current economic recession was “like a giant asteroid, something completely unrelated to our own doing that just happened to hit us.” But Mr. Falkenstein noted, “an asteroid hit it” is in fact a favorite explanation of planetary scientists for nearly every anomaly in the solar system. Mercury has an unusually iron core? An asteroid hit it, blasting off much of its rocky mantle. Venus spins far slower, and in the opposite sense, compared to the other planets? Blame an asteroid strike. A giant impact is the current favorite theory … Continue reading →