Vatican Observatory Archives - Vatican Observatory Foundation Faith and Science

Looking for Wormwood

Article (blog post) 1800 words Level: all audiences “Is the Vatican Observatory searching for the star called Wormwood from the Book of Revelation?” This question was asked during the Q&A session that followed a talk about the V.O. given by one of the members of the Vatican Observatory Foundation’s Board of Directors, and Christopher Graney, writing for the Vatican Observatory’s Sacred Space Astronomy (The Catholic Astronomer) blog, answers it. Click here to read this article from Sacred Space Astronomy (The Catholic Astronomer), the blog of the Vatican Observatory Foundation. … Continue reading →

2018 Vatican Observatory Summer School

Video 7.5 minutes Level: all audiences This video from the Vatican Observatory Foundation’s YouTube channel features Vatican Observatory Director Br. Guy Consolmagno, Professor and Director of the Astrophysics Doctorate at Universidad Andrés Bello, Dante Minniti, and different student participants in the 2018 Vatican Observatory Summer School (VOSS), discussing the VOSS (“the best summer school in the world”). … Continue reading →

Audra Baleisis: Vatican Observatory Summer School or VOSS

Video 24 minutes Level: all audiences This video from the Vatican Observatory Foundation’s YouTube channel features Audra Baleisis, a former student from the Vatican Observatory Summer School (VOSS), discussing her experiences at the Summer School and how those experiences related to aspects of her career in astronomy education. From the Vatican Observatory Foundation: Dr. Audra Baleisis, Instructional Consultant at the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching Engineering at the University of Michigan, spoke at the 2017 Annual Seminar held in Ann Arbor. Audra is also an alumna of one of the Vatican Observatory Summer Schools (VOSS) in Castel Gandolfo. In her talk she described the summer school and how it affected her. The schools are unique in that they are comprised of only 25 international beginning graduate students in astrophysics – any two from any one country. Hear how Audra describes her experience and how it affected her. … Continue reading →

On Stellar Spectrometry

Article 4 pages Level: high school and above This is an 1868 paper by Fr. Angelo Secchi, who conducted pioneering research into the nature of stars and whose work laid the foundations for the modern Vatican Observatory. Here Fr. Secchi groups stars by the characteristics of their spectra, noting that stars seem to fall into a certain number of types. He writes, “We have therefore, without doubt, in the heavens a grand fact, the fundamental distinction between the stars according to a small number of types; this opens a field for very many important cosmological speculations.” He also notes that observing the spectra of stars can tell us something about their motions. Indeed, studying the motions of stars by means of their spectra has yielded all sorts of information about them, including whether they have planets orbiting them. Fr. Secchi’s paper was published in the Report of the Thirty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science [1868]. Click … Continue reading →

Finding God in the Cosmos: An Interview with a Vatican Astronomer

Article 1700 words Level: all audiences A 2018 interview of Vatican Observatory astronomer David Brown, S.J., by Sean Salai, S.J., for America: The Jesuit Review. Salai writes: David Brown, S.J., is a Vatican astronomer specializing in stellar evolution and a native of New Orleans who joined the Society of Jesus in 1991 after earning his B.S. in physics at Texas A&M University. Ordained a priest in 2002, Father Brown completed his Ph.D. in astrophysics at the University of Oxford in England in 2008. Father Brown joined the Vatican Observatory in November 2008, working as a research astronomer and serving as caretaker of the telescopes in Castel Gandolfo. He is a member since 2009 of the American Astronomical Society and since 2012 of the International Astronomical Union. On Oct. 2, I interviewed him at Rockhurst High School during a lecture stop in Kansas City. The focus of the interview is the overlap between Fr. Brown’s vocation as a Jesuit and his … Continue reading →

God Is Also a Cosmologist

Article 900 words Level: all audiences This New York Times article is about an international gathering of cosmologists and astrophysicists hosted by the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, in Berkeley, California in 1997. The purpose of the conference was to explore how contemporary cosmology, the scientific study of the universe, might be compatible with various religions, with focus on the three monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Featured in the article are Joel Primack, a cosmologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz; Andrei Linde, a Stanford University physicist; John Barrow, from Sussex University; Edward Harrison, an astrophysicist with the University of Massachusetts; and Fr. William Stoeger, S.J., of the Vatican Observatory Research Group at the University of Arizona at Tucson. Click here to access this article courtesy of The New York Times. … Continue reading →

Catholic physicist says harmony of faith, science is seamless, not effortless

Article 1000 words Level: all audiences This 2018 article on CatholicPhilly.com features Jonathan Lunine, a planetary scientist and physicist at Cornell University and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a convert to Catholicism. Lunine has worked on the Cassini mission to Saturn, the James Webb Space Telescope, and the Juno mission to Jupiter. The article also touches on the Vatican Observatory and the Society of Catholic Scientists, both of which Lupine has been involved with. Click here to access this article courtesy of CatholicPhilly.com. … Continue reading →

An Astronomer’s View of the Christmas Sky

Article 2000 words Level: all audiences This 2018 article Written by Kyle Peterson and published in the Wall Street Journal is based on an interview Peterson did with Vatican Observatory Director Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J. The article touches on the Star of Bethlehem, the history of the Vatican Observatory and the unique opportunities for science that the V.O. allows, Galileo and Newton, and God coming before science. Peterson notes a deeper problem with dragging science into religious arguments: “[Doing that] always makes the science come first and God come at the end of your chain of reasoning,” Brother Consolmagno says. “To a scientist who’s a believer, it goes the other way around. I’ve already experienced God. I’ve already had religious experiences. I’ve already had things that have made me look at the universe and say: ‘What’s going on?’ Whether they’re tragedies like the death of a loved one or miracles like the birth of a loved one, there are things … Continue reading →

The Vatican observatory, Castel Gandolfo: 80th anniversary celebration

Book 265 pages Level: university This book was edited by Vatican Observatory astronomers Gabriele Gionti, S. J., and Jean-Baptiste Kikwaya Eluo, S.J., and published in 2018 by Springer. It includes articles on a variety of topics related to the Vatican Observatory, its history, and the work of its astronomers. These topics include the Leap Second Debate, a historical telescope, cosmology, near Earth objects, outreach to the popular press, philosophy, stellar and galactic astronomy, and more. From the publisher: This book presents contributions from an internal symposium [September 2015] organized to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Specola Vaticana, or Vatican Observatory, in the Papal Palace of Castel Gandolfo. The aim is to provide an overview of the scientific and cultural work being undertaken at the Observatory today and to describe the outcomes of important recent investigations. The contents cover interesting topics in a variety of areas, including planetary science and instrumentation, stellar evolution and stars, galaxies, cosmology, quantum gravity, the history of astronomy, … Continue reading →

Semblanza de Michael Heller (Premio Templeton 2008)

Article 1100 words Level: all audiences A brief discussion by Javier Sánchez Cañizares regarding the life and work of Fr. Michael Heller (Fr. Heller is an adjunct scholar with the Vatican Observatory), on the occasion of Fr. Heller being awarded the 2008 Templeton Prize. Javier Sánchez Cañizares is part of the Grupo Ciencia, Razón y Fe at Universidad de Navarra. He writes: A partir de la supremacía de una superestructura matemática ideal (un campo formal o campo de ‘racionalidad’) sobre la materia, su pensamiento conduce a la idea tradicional de un Dios trascendente que, por otra parte, es el origen creador, el fundamento del ser, del que surge el espacio-tiempo del mundo creado. Heller explica su posición así en la conferencia de recepción del premio: “Los procesos del universo pueden ser visualizados como una sucesión de estados de modo que el estado precedente es causa del siguiente (…). Hay siempre una ley dinámica que prescribe cómo un estado genera otro. … Continue reading →

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