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IAU Executive Committee meets at Vatican Observatory

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Written by Fr. Peter Lah, SJ The International Astronomical Union (IAU) executive committee visited the Vatican Observatory (Specola Vaticana) on May 15th, 2019. The 23-member group included the executive committee members (13), division presidents (8) and two general secretariat staff. They held three working sessions on the premises of the Specola, followed by the tour of the permament exhibition in the telescope domes of Villa Barberini. The visit concluded with a dinner where they and their spouses were greeted by members of the Jesuit community. On Monday, May 13, the IAU executive committee met at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. Fr. Paul Mueller, the vice director of the Specola, gave a talk on the history of Vatican Observatory’s relationship with the Union. The Accademia dei Lincei is the place of the first IAU General Assembly in 1922, during which meeting the participants also visited the Vatican Observatory in its location in Vatican City. The Eighth IAU General Assembly also … Continue reading →

Across the Universe: Off The Beach

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This entry is part 33 of 190 in the series Across the Universe

This column first appeared in The Tablet in August 2004. It ran here at the Catholic Astronomer in August, 2015. Scientists have a reputation of being nerds with no social skills, and yet like actors and athletes we spend most of our careers working in teams. It’s a rare scientific paper that has only one author. This social aspect of science is especially clear at the annual meetings of scientific organizations. Obviously meetings are important for practical reasons. If you don’t tell anyone what you’ve done, you might as well not have done it. If you don’t know what others are doing, you can’t pitch in to help the field along. And if we didn’t have meeting deadlines to meet, we’d never get the work done! But meetings are also attractive precisely because they are social events. The first week of August [2004] found me in a resort hotel on the beach of Rio de Janeiro with two hundred other … Continue reading →

Matter and Energy: the14th Marcel Grossman Meeting

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This article was written in Italian by Fr. Gabriele Gionti, SJ, of the Vatican Observatory. It originally appeared in the L’Osservatore Romano on July 29, 2015. The translation is by VOF Development Director Katie Steinke,and has been adapted for this blog post by Br. Guy. When Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity began to be understood not simply as a theory with an intrinsic mathematical beauty but as something that could be applied successfully to describe compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes, relativistic astrophysics was born. General Relativity describes the universe close to the beginning of time (t=0). But “time zero” itself is a “singularity”: many quantities that are basic elements of the theory no longer have a meaning that can be described by the theory. Close to that moment, in what is called the “Planck Time,” it has been proposed that gravity could be described through Quantum Mechanics into what has been called quantum gravity. Two theories moving in this direction are … Continue reading →