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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: Tom Swift and his Helium Pycnometer

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This entry is part 16 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

  This column first ran in The Tablet in July, 2004…and again, here, in 2015 Looking over my shoulder at the computer screen, Bob Macke starts telling me about a cartoon he’d seen on an office door at MIT. ‘The first panel,’ he says, ‘was a guy labeled “cartoon scientist,” surrounded by boiling test-tubes and sparking electrical equipment, shouting that he’s discovered the Elixir of Life. The second panel, labeled “real scientists,” was just a bunch of people looking at a computer screen, and one says to the other, “I think our data point should be plotted in red.”’ I give him a dirty look. Two keystrokes later, and our data points are now plotted in red. It’s two weeks before I leave for the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, and I’m busy trying to prepare three papers. One is a collaboration with a colleague in Pennsylvania. I’ve posted a rough draft of our paper on a web page … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Hidden Complications

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This entry is part of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in July 2017 Following on last week’s reposting, here’s yet another Juno column! [Two years] ago, Nasa’s Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter orbit (as described in my Tablet column for July 2016). Its highly elliptical path periodically brings it close to the tops of Jupiter’s clouds, and this month one such low pass brought it right over the famous Red Spot, a hurricane-like storm some three times larger than planet Earth. The storm appears to have been raging in Jupiter’s atmosphere for at least three hundred years; Cassini first described it in 1665, though the first color depiction of it is in a painting from 1711, on display in the Vatican Museum. The internet is now full of glorious, if somewhat gaudy, images of swirls and eddies seen by the Juno camera. In fact, the camera on the Juno spacecraft was an afterthought. Since the science team was put together to probe Jupiter with … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: It’s A Small World

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This entry is part 1 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in July 2016 On July 4, 2016, the Juno spacecraft went into orbit around Jupiter, beginning its mission to probe the interior of our solar system’s largest planet…, and undoubtedly it will be years before we really know what we’ve found there. [The latest results can be found here.] Even though my own research has little to do with Jupiter, I have a personal stake in this spacecraft. Back ten years ago when NASA was deciding what their next big mission would be they solicited proposals from the community, and Juno was one of five possible missions reviewed by a panel of experts. I was one of those experts [as described in an earlier Across the Universe posting, here]. The Juno proposal addressed a fundamental question about gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn. (Hundreds of such gas giants have been discovered orbiting other stars, as well.) Are they lumps of gas that … Continue reading →

Happy Birthday to the Father of Astrophysics!

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Father Angelo Secchi, sometimes called the Father of Astrophysics, was born 200 years ago on this day (June 28). [Note that many sources get his birthday wrong, thinking it was the 29th. He was born on the 28th, baptized on the 29th, according to his biographer Dr. Ileana Chinnici, who’s seen the documents in question. Also many sources think that he had a first name beginning with a P, often listed as Pietro, because he was often referred to as “P. Angelo Secchi” but in fact the P there stands for Padre, signifying that he was a priest.] Secchi’s work at the Roman College attracted great positive attention the science and the Church at a time when both were under attack… and probably led to the foundation of the Vatican Observatory a few years after his death in 1879. Father Chris Corbally has written a short piece about him which is running in the American Astronomical Society’s This Month in … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Deep Impact

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This entry is part 170 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This article from The Tablet was first published in June, 2005, thirteen years ago, just before the “Deep Impact” probe hit. (And rerun here in 2015.) It’s interesting to see what we were hoping to learn… how little we knew; how little we know. The folks who work out the celestial mechanics of space probes are a clever bunch, with a techie’s sense of humor. A few years ago, the NEAR spacecraft arrived at asteroid Eros on Valentine’s Day. The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe was designed to land on Mars on Christmas morning (not the only present that Christmas to arrive broken, I suspect). And this year [2005], on the Fourth of July, an American probe called “Deep Impact” hopes to make a splash as dramatic as any fireworks display by plunging at 37,100 kilometers per hour – London to New York in nine minutes – into the nucleus of the comet Temple 1. Before the space age, all one could see of … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Members of the Band

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This entry is part 169 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in June 2017 June 2017 marked the 50th anniversary of the Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper album, and of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Visiting Chicago that month, on my way to buy the Sgt. Pepper re-issue I found myself driving past Fermilab. The main building of Fermilab, 16-story Wilson Hall, is two curved slabs shaped like hands in prayer. It’s been compared to a French gothic cathedral. Rising above the flat Illinois prairie, it’s easily visible from the highway I was on – Kirk Road. The comparison to a church goes beyond its architecture. Fermilab is a classic example of “big science.” For 50 years it’s been home to 1750 scientists and engineers, working on projects ranging from the discovery of subatomic particles to the exploration of the nature of the neutrino. By generating the building blocks of the universe, then smashing them together, they’ve both confirmed and challenged our theories of how reality … Continue reading →

A letter from a Faith and Astronomy Workshop alumnus

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Dear Br. Guy: Fr. Timothy Sauppé here. I was in the 2015 inaugural seminar class at which you challenged us to take back to our parishes what we learned that week.  Well, as you know, since then I have been holding Star Parties at our local county park and giving talks on the effects of light pollution.   Most recently, I have had a commemorative bench installed and tomorrow we will honor a former parishioner who controlled 15 of the 70 earth and space based telescopes on August 17, 2017 and helped with the detection of the cosmic event from 130 million years ago that become GW170817.  He name is Dr. Jeff Cooke and he will be honored by our city and parish at 11 AM.  Here is a layout of the bench’s back which we filled with scientific information and pictures.   Pope Leo XIII would be proud.   God Bless, Fr. Sauppé This is a good place to … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: By Paper, to the Stars

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This entry is part 168 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in June, 2004, and first published here in 2015… read the end to find out what happened! The people who design airplanes say that a plane can’t fly until its weight is matched by the weight of its paperwork. The same must be true for launching spacecraft to another planet. Last month [May 2004] I took part on a NASA panel in Washington DC, reviewing five competing plans to build a planetary probe; in the run-up to the panel I was shipped 30 pounds of paper to read. NASA’s “New Frontiers” program is a development of another project driven by piles of paperwork: the Solar System Decadal Survey commissioned by NASA and executed by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. After hearing from hundreds of planetary scientists at meetings around the world (and reading white papers solicited and gathered by various international  societies) a committee of graybeards outlined where NASA should be … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Ordinary Time

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This entry is part 167 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in June, 2006, and re-run in 2015 here. The coincidence of the church calendar it mentions is also true this year, 2018… the text has been slightly altered to align it with 2018’s calendar. The work detailed here outlines what I was doing twelve years ago. An update appears at the end of the column.) Next weekend marks an unusual event in our recent Church calendar: a Sunday in “Ordinary Time.” What with Lent and the Easter season, and then the special Feasts of the Trinity and Corpus Christi, Ordinary Time has been rare lately. But I’ve been celebrating “ordinary time” at the Vatican Observatory as well. Unusual for me, I’ve actually been able to manage a month’s uninterrupted work in my laboratory. My airline’s frequent flyer program tells me I’ve flown over 27,000 miles since the last ordinary Sunday before Lent: an observing run at the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, a meeting … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: DIY Religion

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This entry is part 166 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in May, 2005; we ran it here at the blog in 2015 Astronomy pulls you out of your day to day world and makes you realize that the universe has bigger questions than “what’s for dinner?” and “why is my boss such a pain?” But what does an astronomer do to pull himself out of a day-to-day already filled with galaxies and black holes? In January, 2005, I began a Jesuit program called Tertianship, a period of study and prayer leading up to final vows where I’ve been challenged to move outside my own familiar modes of spirituality, to work outside my comfort zone. For me, that has meant working with people. For six weeks in May, 2005, I lived at Santa Clara University, talking religion to engineers and scientists in Silicon Valley. The pattern of religious life for these “techies” is familiar: Students are consumed by questions about ultimate truth and the meaning of their own … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Techie Dreams

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This entry is part 165 of 170 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in May, 2008, under the title “The Magic is Real” We ran it again here in 2015. It’s hard to believe but the Iron Man movie. credited with launching the current Marvel Universe franchise, is now ten years old… I have a friend who has found a new drug: it can keep him awake and programming at his computer for 36 hours straight, without too many bad side effects… or so he claims. I think he’s nuts; aside from the obvious dangers of self-prescribing anything, I happen myself to find sleeping to be a beautifully spiritual experience. (At least, that’s what I tell the homilist after Mass.) But I was struck mostly by the motivation behind my friend’s drug abuse. He is so passionately in love with being alive and doing his work that he resents having to waste eight hours sleeping every night.   That passion is one of the great things … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Transit of Venus

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This entry is part 164 of 170 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 →