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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: The competent man

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

This column first ran in The Tablet in October 2018 When was the Golden Age of science fiction? To quote sf fan Peter Graham, it’s “twelve.” But certainly science fiction came into its own during World War Two and its aftermath when John W. Campbell edited Astounding Stories. Alec Nevala-Lee’s new book, Astounding, provides a fascinating look at Campbell and three of his most notable authors: Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and L. Ron Hubbard. When I was twelve I was a passionate consumer of their stories, anthologized and conveniently shelved in our public library just outside the children’s section. Even then I knew these stories were silly, if fun. What I never appreciated at the time was how this genre would come to dominate our culture. One striking insight of Nevala-Lee’s excellent book is how those early science fiction stories praised the engineer as “the competent man.” The way they glorified competence perhaps reflected the fact that most of … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Featureless Features

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This entry is part 93 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

At the end of September 2016, Rosetta finally ended its mission by crashing into its comet. This column, about an earlier aspect of the Rosetta mission, first appeared in The Tablet in October 2010; we first ran it here in 2016.   Back in July [2010], ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft, en route to a comet rendezvous in 2014, flew past asteroid Lutetia, a 100 km pile of rock orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. The result of that encounter was a hot topic of both the European Planetary Science Conference in Rome in September and a meeting of American planetary astronomers in Pasadena in October [2010]. Studying asteroids has always been challenging. Even in the largest telescopes they’re mere dots of light, too small to show any shapes, much less surface details. We can only infer their nature from the most subtle of hints: how their brightness varies as they spin, how much infrared light they radiate, their visible and infrared colours. Minerals that contain … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: A Damp Kaboom

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This entry is part 92 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in October 2009; we first ran it here in 2016 “Where’s the kaboom?” asked my friend, imitating the whiny voice of the cartoon character Marvin the Martian. “There was supposed to be a Moon-shattering kaboom!” We were watching live television coverage of NASA’s LCROSS lunar orbiter impacting into a dark crater on the Moon. The idea was that water ice might be hidden in the shadows of craters like this one, set in a region of the Moon’s south pole where sunshine never reaches. Water vapor from all the comets that have hit the Moon over the last four billion years might be trapped and frozen there. By slamming a rocket into those shadows, a giant plume of rock and ice would be lifted out of the shadows and into the view of the nearby spacecraft, and telescopes on Earth. Or so proclaimed the hyperactive NASA press office. In fact, at the impact, only a faint infrared … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Stellar Round Up

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This entry is part 91 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in October 2008; we first ran it here in 2016 Black Mesa, Oklahoma sounds like the setting for a Hollywood Western. It looks like one, too. Every year at the Okie-Tex Star Party, three hundred amateur astronomers camp out for a week with their telescopes there, in hopes of dark dry skies. Some of their “amateur” instruments are larger in aperture than the telescopes of the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo. The miracle of computerized fabrication and the modern Dobsonian mount (a way of holding a telescope in place that replaces complex hardware with simple Teflon pads) has brought the cost of quality optics to the point where the price of a large telescope can be less than that of a small automobile. My GPS unit directed me as far as Boise City, two hours north of Amarillo, Texas; after that, I was following roads too small for most maps. I was there … Continue reading →

ⓜ The day I almost met Buzz… Diary of 11 October, 2019

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This entry is part 46 of 46 in the series Diary

So, this week I was supposed to meet Buzz Aldrin. It didn’t happen, but how it almost happened is a story. And it reminds me of all the other famous (and almost famous) that I met (or almost met)… But first, our stats: As of today, we have 143 paid subscribers, an increase of 4 since last month. Every one of you is most welcome, and every one of you helps the cause! What’s more, there are (as of this writing) 9203 people who get notified of new postings, a jump of about 150 compared to last month. We continue to grow… still,  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 about two visits to Dunkin Donuts … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Asking the right questions

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This entry is part 43 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

This column ran in The Tablet in October, 2007; we first ran it here in 2015 My first scientific paper, more than thirty [forty!] years ago, was a review of the icy moons of Jupiter. Knowing only the mass and volume of the moon Europa and the evidence of its bright surface, I calculated that Europa’s density matched a mixture of rock and ice, with enough rock (90%) that its natural trace radioactivity would, over the age of the solar system, melt the ice. Europa, I asserted, should have a shiny thin ice crust, a moon-like rocky center, and a liquid ocean water between the two. I even speculated about creatures swimming in that ocean. Then the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft arrived and mapped that moon, showing the kinds of cracks expected for ice overlaying an ocean. And Europa deflected Jupiter’s magnetic field just like a salty, electrically conductive ocean might do. Now I’ve been invited to co-author the lead … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Changing names

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This column first ran in The Tablet in October 2018 Re-reading an old science fiction book, I came across reference to the “Russell Diagram”, the relation between a star’s intrinsic brightness and its spectral class. It’s the foundation of modern astrophysics, known to every student of astronomy. Except, we all know it as the “Hertzsprung-Russell” diagram. Was the author just saving words? No, he’d learned his astronomy in the 1920s, when the law was named only for Henry Norris Russell. In the 1930s a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to also honor Ejnar Hertzsprung; he had created such a diagram in 1911 for stellar clusters, while Russell used more general assumptions in his 1913 version. The two astronomers were lifelong friends and often joked about how each one’s work would parallel and confirm the other’s. That bit of history came up at [the 2018] IAU meeting, held in Vienna, because a similar change is in the making. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Jabberwocky and the Curious Cat

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This entry is part 87 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in September, 2008; we published it here in 2016. A correspondent in Britain has sent to me an article from the Times about Jonny Wilkinson, a famous rugby player, who has found the meaning of life in a combination of “esoteric science and Buddhism.” He is quoted saying, “I read about Schrödinger’s Cat and it had a huge effect on me… It was all about the idea that an observer can change the world just by looking at something; the idea that mind and reality are somehow interconnected. It is difficult to put into words, but it hit me like a steam train.” I know little of rugby and nothing at all of Mr. Wilkinson. As for Buddhism and quantum physics, I did study both while doing philosophy as a young Jesuit: one semester of each. Mostly, I learned that one semester’s study was not nearly enough to qualify me as an expert … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: New Heavens, New Earth

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This entry is part 39 of 185 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in September, 2007. We first ran it here in 2015. A group working in the interface of science and theology at a Jesuit university in the American midwest invited me to give a talk at a workshop on “Cosmology Breakthroughs and the God Question.” When I agreed, I thought I’d be in North America already. Instead, I flew 5000 miles from Rome to make the talk. I’m not a cosmologist, and God isn’t a question; not to me, anyway. I study planets. What’s the connection between planets and God? Well, in the opening words of the Creed we claim to believe in a God who created heaven and earth. And certainly my field has redefined the meaning of “heaven and earth.” When you talk about God creating the “earth” we all instinctively look around and see this flat disk of dirt and streams and lakes we call “here,” the earth; and a sky overhead … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Words that Change Reality

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This entry is part 38 of 185 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 →