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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.

Three Ways to Spread What’s Going On…

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This entry is part 30 of 30 in the series Diary

I got an email recently from someone who’d read an interview of mine… Hi Br. Guy, I just came across this 2017 article. Your quote, “More scientists who are church-goers need to make their science known to their parishioners”  is something that I have contemplated over the years but wasn’t really sure about how to exactly go about it, do you have any suggestions? Good question, actually. Here’s how I answered him:     Great to hear from you! And good on you, to call my bluff about me saying what “somebody else” should be doing! So here are some thoughts off the top of my head… Then I sent the following: 1. Read and spread the word about our two web sites, The Catholic Astronomer and our Faith and Science resource site. 2. Get involved with groups already in existence in your parish, such as the CCD classes the Knights of Columbus your local parish Mens’ club if one exists Once you … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: First scout

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This entry is part 2 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in November 2017 In the month after its discovery we were able to train some of the largest telescopes in the world on the new visitor to our solar system (that I wrote about here), a small body whose orbit indicates that it is had come to us from outside our own solar system. “We’ve been expecting for twenty years to find some body on an orbit like this,” explained Brett Gladman to me. He’s an astronomer at the University of British Columbia who specializes in the faint distant objects of our solar system. (I was visiting Vancouver in November 2017.) He wasn’t surprised that its path was almost perpendicular to the plane where our sun’s planets orbit. There’s no reason why it couldn’t come from any direction, since it is not tied to our system. He wasn’t surprised that it was small, barely visible to our biggest telescopes. “In space, collisions mean … Continue reading →

An “Across the Universe” never run: God’s action

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This entry is part 3 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

Sometimes I write columns for Across the Universe that, for various reasons, I decide not to submit. Here is one that I prepared in 2016 while attending the 2016 General Congregation. I decided to go with last week’s column instead… in part because with the topic below I would either have run short (as here, well below the typical 600 words) or I would have gone way too long… I have been participating in the 36th General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, which finally closed on November 12 [2016]. It was an odd experience… half, six-week-long retreat; half, six-week-long faculty meeting. As you can imagine, I didn’t get a whole lot of science done during that time. But that’s not to say that I wasn’t thinking about science. It wasn’t particular projects waiting for me back at the office that held my attention, though, but rather the the whole enterprise of being a scientist. The fact is, for all … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The Impact of Asteroids

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This entry is part 4 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in November 2016 When I first arrived at the Vatican Observatory, more than 20 years ago, I decided to take advantage of its extensive meteorite collection by doing a systematic measurement of meteorite densities. Why? Mostly because no one else had done it before; no one had ever had both the access to such a collection, and the time to make such a survey. (It’s taken more than twenty years, and the work continues.) Soon after I started publishing my first results, spacecraft began visiting the asteroids that were the source of these meteorites, measuring their densities as well. The first surprise was that the asteroids were far less dense than the meteorites derived from them… showing that the asteroids were not solid rocks but rather, loose piles of meteoritic rubble. Our meteorite data allows us to make specific, quantitative estimates of the actual rock and metal content to be found within a … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Spicy planet stories

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This entry is part 38 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in October, 2006. We first ran it here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015 Doing science has often been compared to reading a mystery novel; the hunger to know “whodunit” keeps us turning the pages. But what stops us from just skipping to the last page, and moving on to the next book? Perhaps a better metaphor is a spice cake. The real pleasure of the process lies in the spicy experience of wondering. Actually finding out is just the icing on the cake. At the annual meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society, held earlier this month [2006] in Pasadena, California near the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), dozens of little slivers of spice cake were on offer. A wonderful little asteroid system, called 1999 KW4, passed within half a million kilometers of the Earth about five years ago; it’s taken that long to analyze the … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: For the love of the stars…

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This entry is part 37 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in October, 2005; we first ran it here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015 Standing in the lee of The Leviathan, a handful of amateur astronomers and their cool white telescopes huddled against the night Irish wind, praying for the skies to clear. We were attending the 20th Whirlpool Amateur Astronomy conference, held every autumn at the castle of Lord Rosse in Birr. Here in the 1840’s the Third Earl had built the world’s largest telescope: rightly called a leviathan, it boasted a mirror five feet in diameter set in a tube fifty feet long. With this giant he’d discovered the spiral arm structure in that galaxy off the handle of the Plough called The Whirlpool. (Actually it’s six feet in diameter, as I will discuss in a later post!) The third Earl was a classic example of an amateur astronomer: one who did his work only for the love of the … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Souvenirs from Space

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This entry is part 36 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in October, 2004; it ran here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015 Typhoon 23 and I arrived in Japan on the same day. My mission (I can’t speak for the typhoon) was to attend an international workshop on sample returns from asteroids. Our hosts were the  scientists and engineers of  the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency who are eagerly awaiting the arrival next summer of their spacecraft, Hayabusa, at asteroid Itokawa. (The remarkable challenges and eventually successes of Hayabusa can are described nicely at its Wikipedia site.) Astronomers usually have to be content with observing their objects from afar. But nothing beats actually going to a place to see what it’s really like. Itokawa is a potato-shaped lump of rock less than half a kilometer in diameter that apparently drifted into our neighborhood from the asteroid belt; though it looks like a typical asteroid, its orbit is not out beyond Mars but rather much … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Eccentric visitor

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This entry is part 5 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in October 2017 Studying the universe forces us to see ourselves in a new and often disorienting context. It’s not always easy. Talking with astronauts aboard the International Space Station on October 26 [2017], Pope Francis asked them, “traveling in space, thinking about things we take for granted here on Earth like the concept of “up” or “down”… tell us, is there something in particular that has surprised you, living in the Space Station?” The American astronaut Mark VandeHei replied, “in this environment, where we really don’t need the concept of up and down, to get my bearings I still have to decide which direction to perceive as up.” Every day in my meteorite lab I work with rocks that have passed through the sky (“meteorite” comes from the Greek word for sky), tangible evidence that the clouds are not an impenetrable barrier between us and rest of the solar system. We can … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Planetary Counsels

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This entry is part 33 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in September 2005, and republished here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015. Of course, as we all know, the discussions talked about here finally came to their climax in August 2006 with the definition of a “Dwarf Planet” as I described here. During the Council of Nicaea, so the story goes, tempers ran so high over the question of defining Jesus’ human and divine natures that fist fights broke out in the streets. Our councils this past month were much smaller, but no less heated. In Brazil, Norway, and Britain, various subsets of an International Astronomical Union (IAU) Working Group met in August and September [2005] to finally try to define a planet. Although our working group has been around for more than a year (I wrote about it here in April, 2004) the situation reached a crisis this summer with the announcement of the particulars for a body temporarily designated 2003 … Continue reading →

Time’s running out!

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… to apply for the Faith and Astronomy Workshop! Here’s some eye-candy to draw your attention… We’ve had an excellent response so far, and it will be a challenge to select 25 participants from the more-than-25 who have already applied. But there’s still plenty of time to make our decision even more challenging! It only takes a minute or two to apply, and frankly, when it comes to the selection process, the more the merrier! Just click on the box on this web site to be directed to the application form. Find out more about the workshop here: Apply Now for the 2019 Faith and Astronomy Workshop!   … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Stories of Another World

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This entry is part 32 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

I’ve recently returned from this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, held this year in San Jose, California. This version of the  column, published in the Tablet in September of 2004, was first published here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015. It describes my reaction following the 2004 Worldcon, held the first weekend of September in Boston.  Stories, myths, and tales make ideas a part of popular culture. Jesus taught with parables; fables and fairy tales are the way we teach children about life. Even the ancient Greek myths, it’s been argued, might have been deliberate devices for organizing and transmitting information about the natural world to nonscientific people. Once an idea gets turned into a story, people pay attention long enough to listen. And they’ll remember it. The images from Dante are far more vivid than the arguments of Aquinas. All fiction makes assumptions about science and religion. A good mystery, for instance, can depend on the physical possibility of certain … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Sins against the Earth

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This entry is part 177 of 174 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in September 2017 Last July [2017] I visited my sister, a retired schoolteacher who’d moved to Florida to be close to our aged parents. From there I continued on to the North American Science Fiction Convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Two months later came the hurricane season. First, Hurricane Harvey dumped meters of water on Houston. My colleagues near the Johnson Space Center survived without much damage, but a nearby neighborhood where friends once lived was inundated; it may never be rebuilt. Then Hurricane Irma struck Florida. Again, my parents’ and sister’s houses suffered little damage, although my parents (along with more than half the state, millions of people) lost power for a week… not a trivial thing for retirees in a climate that demands air conditioning. Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, amazingly, dwarfed even those other mega-storms. During my July visit I’d met up with a student who’d observed with … Continue reading →