Tag Archives: Christmas

Three paths to enlightenment. Or something. (Only one costs you money!)

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This entry is part 31 of 31 in the series Diary

This has been a great year for the Vatican Observatory Foundation, in a lot of ways. We’ve made major upgrades to the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. We supported a fantastically successful Vatican Observatory Summer School, the 16th that we’ve run since the program began in 1986. The Jesuits and our adjunct astronomers have given hundreds of public talks and appeared in dozens of newspapers and media interviews. (I even got my picture on the front page of the New York Times!) Our Faith and Astronomy digital library is now up and running, at it has already attracted nearly 50,000 views. And the Catholic Astronomer website is now followed by more than 8,000 subscribers. In terms of supporting the scientific and educational work of the Vatican Observatory, we’ve never done more. The one downside? We are running seriously short in fundraising.  How serious? Well… every year we make up a budget, and for 2018 we assumed that we’d be able to … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Lights all askew in the heavens…

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This entry is part 1 of 178 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in December 2015 One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his theory of General Relativity and changed the way we understand our universe. Newton had shown, 200 years earlier, that one could use mathematics (including his newly invented Calculus) to describe and even predict the way things in our physical universe move. But to do that, Newton had had to assume without definition the concepts of space, mass, and time. He had to assume that forces like gravity acted “at a distance”… Earth could pull on the Moon even if there’s nothing but this mystical “gravity” connecting them. Finally, he had to envision a playing field, the “inertial frame of reference”, where these forces could move those masses through space, over time. The whole genius of physics is to describe motion and change; but change, relative to what? Newton’s unmoving frame of reference was his answer. But was the Earth’s surface such a … Continue reading →

Br. Guy’s Christmas Message 2017

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Br. Guy takes a moment to consider the Christmas Season from an Astronomer’s point of view. Thank you for all the support the Vatican Observatory Foundation has received during this year: financial support, emotional support and, above all, prayers. To the entire Vatican Observatory family, the staff, the many colleagues, and so many friends warmest wishes of a Blessed Christmas! Image Description: “Newborn stars, hidden behind thick dust, are revealed in this image of a section of the Christmas Tree Cluster from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, created in joint effort between Spitzer’s Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) instruments.

The newly revealed infant stars appear as pink and red specks toward the center of the combined IRAC-MIPS image. The stars appear to have formed in regularly spaced intervals along linear structures in a configuration that resembles the spokes of a wheel or the pattern of a snowflake. Hence, astronomers have nicknamed this the “Snowflake Cluster.” Star-forming clouds like … Continue reading →

In the Sky this Week- December 19, 2017

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This entry is part 10 of 73 in the series In the Sky This Week

Mercury rises with the dawn, low in the southeastern sky. Jupiter, Mars and the star Spica are aligned almost in a straight line in the predawn sky. A thin waxing crescent Moon appears at dusk in the southwest on 21st. The Moon with be at first quarter on Christmas; all week long would be a great time to set up your telescope and show the Moon to family, friends and neighbors during this holiday season! The Sun One tiny little sunspot, and that’s all folks! Click the image below to see a larger version at the Solar Dynamics Observatory site, then scroll way over to the upper-left to find the sunspot. If you click the image above, in the close-up view you will notice grainy … somethings on the Sun – these are called granules. “Granules are small (about 1000 km across) cellular features that cover the entire Sun except for those areas covered by sunspots. These features are the tops of … Continue reading →

How Does an Astronomer Explain the Science Behind The Christmas Phenomenon?

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Have you ever wondered whether the Magi really saw a Star leading them to Jesus? A few years ago, the Catholic News Service interviewed Brother Guy Consomagno, S.J., about how astronomers explain the science behind the Christmas phenomenon. This video posted, also posted on our Faith & Science website, will help you to better understand the scientific possibilities and the importance of this religious symbol from the Director of the Vatican Observatory. Have a Blessed Christmas! … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Angels Tweet on High

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This entry is part 149 of 178 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in December 2012 “The Pope is on Twitter,” I am told [in 2012]. “Shouldn’t the Vatican Observatory have a Twitter account, too?” I’m the Observatory’s expert on such media (expert up to 1995) so I look into this. I start with a personal Twitter account, and then a few days later @VaticanObserv is born. (So are versions in French, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, thanks to our polyglot community.) Twitter, a network of friends communicating in 140 character snips, had already been around for half a dozen years and boasts half a billion accounts, but it’s new to me. My friends seem quite proficient at sharing the minutiae of their lives; I agonize over every post, hitting delete more often than send. But soon I discover an unexpected utility for this network. When the American Geophysical Union meets in San Francisco, with latest spacecraft results from Mercury, Mars, and the Moon, I can follow … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Group effort

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This entry is part 148 of 178 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in December 2011 Earlier this month [in 2011], I sent an email to a colleague asking for some data she’d promised me, and I got a rather apologetic reply: “Sorry, I am away from my computer; we’re in Stockholm this week.” Her husband, also an astronomer, had been part of Saul Perlmutter’s Supernova Cosmology Project, and Saul had invited the whole team to join him when he picked up his Nobel Prize for that work. Perlmutter shared the prize with two other astronomers, Brian Schmidt and Adam Reiss. Together they and their collaborators made the most-precise-ever observations of the motions of distant galaxy clusters. Once they’d analyzed these data, they discovered that the universe is not only expanding (as Hubble had first observed more than 80 years ago), but expanding at an ever-faster rate. The energy behind this acceleration is unknown; Perlmutter and his group coined the term “dark energy” to indicate that … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Recognizing the Star

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This entry is part 98 of 178 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in December 2009 The fall of 2009 found me team-teaching a course called “Dynamic Evolution” at LeMoyne College, a small Jesuit university in Syracuse, New York. The biblical scholar from Leuven, Fr. Jan Lambrecht SJ, concentrated on the world-view of the New Testament in the first half of the course; my task was to bring the students forward through the cosmologies of the middle ages and the scientific revolution, to present day views on space and time: quantum theory and relativity. It’s been an exhausting journey. For many of the undergraduates, the shocking message has been how little we know for certain. After an academic path focused mostly on memorizing “facts” they must now come to the realization that everything they’ve been taught is, if not exactly wrong, then at least woefully incomplete. With everything we learn, we also learn how much more there is to know. Certainly, the world of certainties is an illusion. … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: When reason itself becomes flesh

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This entry is part 97 of 178 in the series Across the Universe

This column was first published in The Tablet in December 2008 “In the beginning was the Word.” So opens the Gospel according to St. John. When I was young they called John’s Chapter 1, verses 1-14, “The Last Gospel.” We heard it repeated so often, at the end of every Mass, that the words went past us without registering. Word as used here is our weak English translation for the Greek logos. Logos carries a great weight of philosophical meaning, from “rational discourse” to the fundamental order of the universe. It is the word from which we get logic. Try substituting “Logic” or “Reason” for “Word” in that Gospel: “In the beginning was Logic. In the beginning was Reason. In the beginning was the fundamental rational basis of the universe…” This is our foundation, of course, for science. Logic and reason were with God from the beginning. God is He who built the universe on them. Indeed, the first verse concludes, “and the Logos was God.” That is one … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Christmas Presence

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This entry is part 96 of 178 in the series Across the Universe

This column first ran in The Tablet in December 2007 Job is not a book most people think of for the Christmas season. But there’s an echo of the angels’ Christmas song to the shepherds when God asks Job (in Chapter 38, verse 7) if any human can claim to have been around at the moment of creation, that time “when the morning stars sang together, and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy.” The song of the morning stars is poetry of the highest order. Kepler referred to the motions of the planets among those stars as “the music of the spheres.” In one of my favorite childhood novels, A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle, her young hero actually encounters, in person, the singing spirits of stars. The image reminds us that in its essence, creation is a source of joy; and a lot of fun. What’s it like, I am sometimes asked, to be both a Jesuit brother … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Spinning our Hopes

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This entry is part 48 of 178 in the series Across the Universe

This article was first published in The Tablet in December, 2005. I also ran it a year ago on this blog, before many of you became regular readers… and before I knew how to embed pictures. So I am running it again, with pictures this time. Every December, along with the Christmas rush and the endless round of holiday parties, planetary astronomers have another deadline facing them: the annual Lunar and Planetary Science conference. The meeting is in March; the deadline for submitting papers is early January. [For 2016, it’s January 12.] It’s challenging enough to write up results on deadline; but what is harder, is that really you ought to have some results worth writing up. My last month has been a scramble as I try chasing after the faintest wisp of an idea to see if it has enough substance to talk about in front of a thousand highly critical peers. Lately [this was 2005] we’ve been observing Centaurs, … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: When Reason Itself Becomes Flesh

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This entry is part 47 of 178 in the series Across the Universe

39This column was first published in The Tablet in December, 2008) “In the beginning was the Word.” So opens the Gospel according to St. John. When I was young they called this (John’s Chapter 1, verses 1-14) “The Last Gospel.” We heard it repeated so often at the end of every Mass, that the words went past us without registering. When they tried teaching us Greek in High School, this was a favorite passage; it was an easy exercise, using the same few words over and over, ringing changes on their position and grammar. But of course the underlying philosophy is anything but easy. Word as used here is our weak English translation for the Greek logos. Logos carries a great weight of philosophical meaning, from “rational discourse” to the fundamental order of the universe. It is the word from which we get logic. Try substituting “Logic” or “Reason” for “Word” in that Gospel: “In the beginning was Logic. In the beginning was Reason. In the beginning was the … Continue reading →