Category Archives: Across the Universe

Temporary – used to fix series

Observing Asteroids at VATT, Part 2

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Last April, my post was about doing Citizen Science from the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT). This is a follow-up article about our latest observing run in early December 2019. I would like to thank Mark Trueblood and Robert Crawford who make our observing the success that it is. I would also like to thank the staff of VATT who are on call all hours of the night to help us out when we need help with the telescope and equipment. As I said in my previous article about observing from the VATT, our goal is to observe Near-Earth Asteroids that might, some time in the future, collide with the Earth. “These asteroids might become ‘lost’ because of the uncertainty in their orbits.” By reducing the uncertainty in the orbits of these asteroids, we hope to remove them from the list of asteroid impactors. This five-night observing run was an experiment: Could we observe asteroids that had been discovered only … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Astronomy domine

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This entry is part of 190 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet was first run in December 2018 December 2018 was a busy month in space. The Japanese Hayabusa II mission was orbiting Ryuku, a tiny near-Earth asteroid. A Chinese probe was about to place a lander on the far side of the Moon. NASA’s Insight mission had just arrived on Mars to measure marsquakes and the heat flowing from its interior. Virgin Galactic was testing a ship that can take tourists above the stratosphere. Of all these, my attention was on OSIRIS-REx. (The name is a typical NASA acronym; don’t ask.) This probe had also just arrived at a near-Earth asteroid, named Bennu, with essentially the same mission as Hayabusa II. It was the dream of the late Mike Drake, my first PhD advisor at the University of Arizona; after his death, the science team lead fell to Dante Lauretta, whose PhD director was my MIT classmate Bruce Fegley. And the rest of the science team … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: The competent man

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This entry is part 1 of 190 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: 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: Relics of Space

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This entry is part 2 of 190 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet first ran there in September 2018… I have altered it slightly to bring it up to date. The famous American cynic H. L. Mencken once asserted that every question had an answer that was “neat, plausible, and wrong.” Science is no different. Our meteorite collections have reddish “ordinary” meteorites and black “carbonaceous” ones; meanwhile, in space we see some asteroids with reddish surfaces, while others are pitch black. The connection between the meteorites and the asteroids is thus neat and plausible. But is it right? The holy grail in asteroids is finding the ones with water and carbon. If we are going to be a space-faring species, we’ll need those chemicals to feed us and power our spacecraft. The cost to bring them up to space with us from Earth makes these materials far more valuable than platinum or gold.  We know that some carbonaceous meteorites have carbon and water; and they are distinctively black. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Solar Windjamming

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This entry is part 3 of 190 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet first ran in 2018. The pull of a magnet on a refrigerator is strong enough to hold up a child’s drawing; but move it just a fraction of an inch away and suddenly the tug between the fridge and the magnet is almost nothing. Planets have magnetic fields, too; Earth’s magnetic field points compass needles and gives us the auroras, or “northern lights”. But the strengths of planetary fields, too, drop quickly as you move away from the planet. Earth’s magnetic field doesn’t even reach to its own Moon. The Sun, however, has a magnetic field whose effect can be felt even at the Earth, and indeed out beyond the orbits of the outer planets. Magnetic storms on the Sun can affect our auroras, and occasionally interfere with cell phone and radio transmissions. How is that possible? It’s all connected to a phenomenon called the “solar wind”. The Sun is made mostly of hydrogen gas; … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Father’s Day

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This entry is part 187 of 190 in the series Across the Universe

This column from The Tablet was first published in June, 2018 The students of the Vatican Observatory’s biennial summer school (2018’s year’s topic, stellar variability in the era of large surveys) were received by Pope Francis in a private audience on June 14, 2018. Introducing them, I mentioned to the Pope that along with four weeks of heavy astrophysics our school is also including special lectures to reflect on not only what we are studying, but why we study it.   “Why does the Vatican have an Observatory?” That common question begs the bigger one, why anyone does astronomy. Contrary to what our culture preaches, astronomy doesn’t make you rich, powerful, or sexy. (Maybe that’s why my Jesuit vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience felt so natural.) What astronomy does do, however, is give you the space to contemplate questions bigger than “what’s for lunch?” Doing science is a way of becoming intimate with creation, and thus with the Creator. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Father of the Future

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This entry is part 189 of 190 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 188 of 190 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: An extraordinary, ordinary man

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This entry is part 183 of 190 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 →

Across the Universe: Stories of the Belt

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This entry is part 4 of 190 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in February 2018 January 31 [2018] marked the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of Explorer 1, the first American spacecraft to orbit the Earth. I was five years old; it affected my dreams and aspirations, not to mention my education in science, over the next twenty years. As the story goes, the American rocket and satellite was thrown together in 90 days to answer the launch of Russia’s Sputnik satellite the previous October… and the disaster of our Vanguard rocket, which had blown up on the launch pad. It most notable achievement was the discovery of the Van Allen Belts. Twenty years later, Dr. James Van Allen spoke at my graduate class in space sciences. I recall him describing how he chose to put a Geiger counter into the Explorer satellite because it was cheap, off the shelf, and provided data that was easy to radio back to Earth. They hoped to detect ionized gas … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Looking overhead

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This entry is part 186 of 190 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in January 2018 “What do you see when you look at the stars? Science, heaven, God?” the Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire asked me in 2018. Does the sky look any different to a professional astronomer who is also a person of faith? The first thing I see when I look up at night is the beauty of the stars… just like anyone who can see the night sky.  But I do see more. My father, a US Army Air Corps navigator who once guided a wing of American bombers across the Atlantic to England in 1942, taught me the brighter navigation stars when I was a child. I’d also been given a wonderful book by the children’s writer H. A. Rey (better known for Curious George) that taught the constellations by turning the stars into connect-the-dot puzzles. Even today, whenever I see the stars I immediately start to identify old friends by name. … Continue reading →