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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: Transit of Venus

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This entry is part 2 of 161 in the series Across the Universe

The original version of this article first appeared in The Tablet in May, 2004, announcing the transit as an upcoming event; we ran a version here on the blog in June, 2015.  “There’s a little black spot on the Sun today…” In the Police song “King of Pain” these words evoke an alienating sense of remoteness. But on the morning of June 8, 2004, a much larger spot was visible crossing the Sun, an event that occurs but twice a century; when it happened in the eighteenth century, it changed human history. A “transit” occurs when we see one astronomical object appear to move in front of another. Since Venus orbits between us and the Sun, you might expect it to transit the Sun rather frequently. But the Sun is small, as seen from Earth, and the orbit of Venus is tilted slightly compared to ours, so Venus usually appears to pass above or below the Sun. It’s only when our … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Information and truth

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This entry is part 6 of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in May 2017 The British fantasy writer Neil Gaiman tells the story of attending a gathering of great writers, scholars, and thinkers, and wondering if he really belonged in that group. Next to him, another attendee also named Neil voiced similar doubts. “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.” To which Gaiman replied, “Yes. But you were the first man on the Moon. I think that counts for something.”   In that spirit, in May 2017 I presented to Pope Francis the attendees of our workshop on Black Holes, Gravitational Waves, and Space-time Singularities. The scientists included 35 of the brightest in the field, including a Nobel laureate. Two of them gave the Pope a copy of their work announcing the discovery of gravitational waves. (I gave the Pope a book written by … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Tending Towards Paganism

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This entry is part 8 of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column for The Tablet first ran in May 2006; we first ran it here at The Catholic Astronomer in 2015. It has been one of the more popular postings… “Believing that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism,” proclaimed a Scottish newspaper earlier this month [2006], citing as its authority no less than “the Vatican Astronomer, Guy Consolmagno.” I was as surprised as anyone; though I do worry that creationism can tend towards paganism, I don’t remember being so blunt. Well, he was careful not to put those words into quotation marks. But even if it is an accurate statement of what I believe, does it qualify as news? I’m not a theologian, much less a spokesperson for the Vatican. I’m an astronomer who happens to be a Jesuit, who happens to work at the Vatican. Of course, I have my opinions on matters of theology, but are they any more newsworthy than the … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The Ethics of Extraterrestrials

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This article first appeared in The Tablet in April, 2004; we first ran it here at the Catholic Astronomer in 2015 Astrobiology, so the joke goes, is like theology: an academic discipline where highly educated people argue for years about a subject no one can prove exists. It’s been around a long time under a variety of different names – exobiology, bioastronomy – but only when NASA decided a few years ago that the search for life was a winning strategy to get funding did the field start to get more than begrudging respect. And so, the last week of March [2004], I joined more than 700 scientists gathering at the NASA Ames Research Center for the fourth Astrobiology Science Conference. The setting was both inspiring and cautionary. NASA Ames is located at the old Moffett Field Naval Air Station in California’s Silicon Valley: our meeting was in a large tent in the shadow of the enormous hangers built in the 1930s … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Black Hole Shadows

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2017 We believe in things we cannot see – God, say, or Black Holes – because we observe their effects on the things that we can see. Still, there is a little bit of Doubting Thomas in all of us. It would certainly be nice to have a direct image of what a black hole actually looks like! The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is designed to do just that. It isn’t one instrument, but a collection of radio telescopes spread around world, observing the same object at the same time. Using a technique called Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which compares the very tiny differences between different telescopes’ signals, a high resolution picture emerges. The farther apart the telescopes are, the better the image’s resolution; the EHT telescopes span the width of Earth itself. After nearly 25 years assembling the team of telescopes and refining the technique, this month the EHT … Continue reading →

(Not) Across the Universe: Under a Common Sky

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

Sometimes I write columns and then decide not to submit them to The Tablet. This was my alternate column for April 2016; this is the first time it’s been published. Comments? The Vatican Observatory exists to show the world how the Church supports astronomy, and so a large part of my work is traveling the world to talk about our work. Two recent [2016] stops have been particular eye-openers to me. Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, just outside Salt Lake City, is the premier center of learning for the Mormon Church. For reasons that still puzzle me, I was invited to be the first non-Mormon scientist to give their annual Summerhays Lecture on Science and Religion. They went remarkably out of their way to make me feel at home. Indeed, the university guest house even caters to its gentile guests by having a coffee machine — the only coffee allowed on campus. (Stimulants like caffeine are forbidden to Mormons, … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Planet Nine

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in April 2016; this has been slightly edited. Planet Nine, whose possible existence was first broached in January 2016, has become a hot topic of speculation. By April of that year, one tabloid announced that comets perturbed by Planet Nine would soon lead to the demise of life on Earth! (Astronomer Phil Plait ran an amusing rebuttal in The New Scientist.) But, is there actually a Planet Nine? Recall, an Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance from Earth to the sun. From the sun to Neptune, the farthest known planet, is 30 AU. Pluto is but one of a thousand balls of ice orbiting between 30 to 50 AU. But in 2003, Mike Brown and his team at Cal Tech found a body they named Sedna whose orbit comes no closer to the Sun than 76 AU, and which actually arcs out to nearly 1000 AU. It’s hard to imagine how it could … Continue reading →

A note on the date of Easter

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This entry is part 28 of 29 in the series Diary

Horst Rademacher,  a seismologist at U C Berkeley, wrote to friends of mine there last weekend, asking about the date of Easter: May I bother you with a question, which is probably trivial for astronomers like you to answer. However neither Peggy nor I could find an answer anywhere. Here is the question: Tomorrow (Apr 1) is Easter. According to the classic definition Easter always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. That makes sense, because today is full moon, which is the first full moon after the beginning of spring. And tomorrow is Sunday, hence Easter. However, today’s full moon occurred at 5:37 am PDT. Let’s assume, the full moon would have occurred at 5:37 pm PDT. Applying the definition above from a purely California perspective, tomorrow would still be Easter. However, if we were in the Netherlands, in Germany or in the Vatican for that matter, this assumed full moon would … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Recognition

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

Originally published in The Tablet in March, 2008, and again here in 2015. Slightly edited. A few years ago while I was showing friends around the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, we bumped into a couple of visiting astronomers from Poland. After making the appropriate introductions, I mentioned that Jozef Zycinski also happened to be the archbishop of Lublin. My friends were suitably impressed; an astronomer/archbishop is something most people don’t see every day. But his companion in the hallway, Michael Heller; how could I describe him? As of 2008 I could also say, “he’s the winner of the 2008 Templeton Prize.” I first met Michael Heller in the early 1990s. Chatting over breakfast in a Tucson diner, I innocently asked him what sort of astronomy he did. He explained that he was interested in finding a mathematical framework that could unite quantum theory with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Then he launched into the details of “a noncommutative algebra from … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Science as Story

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

Originally published in The Tablet in March, 2007, and again here in 2015… this version is slightly edited. The late Stephen Jay Gould, Harvard biologist and popular science writer, once described the roles of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria” – they should not be in conflict because they never come in contact. I could see his point; as cases from Galileo to Dawkins have shown, authority in one field rarely translates into authority in the other. But as those same cases also demonstrate, science and religion do overlap all the time in at least one locus: in the human being, who chooses how to live in a world that has both science and religion. Indeed, the same is true of all the worlds each of us live in: our politics, school, favorite music, social background, sports teams, family. We all have our homes in each of those fields. I felt caught up in such a web back in 2007 when a friend … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Fire and Ice

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

Originally published in The Tablet in March, 2006, and republished here in 2015. This version is slightly edited. The 2006 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, held outside the Johnson Space Center in Houston, was unusually rich. We saw fiery dust from an ice-rich comet; startling images from Mars; a new type of lunar rock… and that was just on Monday morning. By Friday afternoon, I was exhausted. I had already heard the Stardust results (see Across the Universe) at the Sunday welcome cocktail party when one of the mission scientists whispered to me, “We’ve found CAIs!” (Another friend on the team described Stardust Principle Scientist Don Brownlee’s first comment when they finally got the samples: “I can’t believe it actually worked!”) These high-temperature grains of Calcium and Aluminum oxides that appear as Inclusions in certain meteorites are thought to represent the first solid materials to crystallize out from the hot gases that made the sun and planets. How did they … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The Glory of a Giant

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This entry is part of 161 in the series Across the Universe

Originally published in The Tablet in March, 2005, during the centennial year of Einstein, and the month when Pope John Paul II died.  It also ran here on The Catholic Astronomer in 2015; it’s slightly edited for 2018. The intense but often erratic news coverage of the events in Rome following the death of Pope John Paul II could tempt one to despair at the state of journalism. With their talent for misstating the obvious, can we have any hope in entrusting to them the legacy of John Paul II, or the significance of his successor? Hope, however, can be found in an example from science, and how the popular press has served the reputation of another giant of the 20th century. The year 2005 was the year of Einstein. In his honor, the UN declared 2005 to be the World Year of Physics. April 18, 2005, marked the 50th anniversary of his death; and it was exactly 100 years … Continue reading →