Huachuca Astronomy Club—Speakers

Father Christopher J. Corbally

Father Christopher J. Corbally, S.J., is a Vice Director of the Vatican Observatory. As such, he oversees the Observatory's research group in Tucson, while maintaining contact and occasional visits to the Observatory's headquarters at Castel Gandolfo, Italy. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Department of Astronomy, University of Arizona.

Father Corbally was born in England and entered the British Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1963. His training included a Licentiate in Philosophy from Heythrop College, Oxfordshire, a B.D. in Theology from London University, and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Toronto.

His scientific research centers around the technique of classifying stars by their spectra. This leads him into problems of the structure and history of the Milky Way Galaxy, especially those in our Solar neighborhood, into the formation and dynamics of systems of multiple stars, and into many aspects of the characteristics and evolution of stars. He was the Project Scientist for the first of the Observatory's telescopes to be built outside of Vatican City State, the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) on Mount Graham, Arizona (pictured, below).

In August 2006 he was chairperson for the Resolutions Committee of the International Astronomical Union. It was this committee which presented to the astronomers of the XXVIth General Assembly in Prague the resolution defining Pluto as a "dwarf planet," now known as Plutoids.

People are often surprised to find that the Vatican has been deeply involved in astronomical research for over 400 years. By touching on highlights of this history and on the contemporary activities of the Vatican Observatory, we learned why the Church is so concerned about science.

August 15, 2008

[The following is a transcript of Father Corbally's talk. Transcription by Del Gordon.]

What is the purpose of the Vatican Observatory? Why does the Vatican have an observatory? Well, quite simple, to spread the Gospel to space aliens! [Fr. Corbally displayed an image of The National Enquirer front page with headlines insinuating that the Pope was communicating with space aliens: “24 Priests to Spread Gospel to Space Aliens!”] You can see that it’s a bit old, even now, and it is certainly, completely false.

So, what started the observatory? It was a real, practical project to reform the calendar. So, other observatories started practical projects. A hundred years before the Paris Observatory and the Royal Greenwich Observatory started, the Vatican was into astronomy, to reform the Julian calendar, which had been going pretty well since the time of Julius Caesar, but it was beginning to get out of step with the seasons.

Why was the Church concerned with the calendar? Well, that dictated the date for Easter. A rule-of-thumb is: the first Sunday after the full moon after the Spring Equinox. If Spring is getting earlier and earlier, then Easter is becoming a winter feast, and that’s no good because it’s all about springtime, and new life. Pope Gregory got a team to look into the matter, including this Jesuit, Father Christopher Clavius. They advised the Pope on how to reform the calendar, and showed him what was going on why it did need reform.

The Tower of the Winds

Pope Gregory XIII had the Tower of the Winds built in 1578. It was called this because on the four walls of the tower were painted the Four Winds: the South Wind, the East Wind wind, the West, the North. The light of the Sun comes through a hole in the south wall. At noontime, the sunbeam will strike a meridian line, and it will vary up and down depending on the time of year. At the Spring Equinox it should be right in the middle, and that’s how you know. Pope Gregory XIII led the calendar reform and that’s why we have the Gregorian Calendar. This was before Galileo refined the telescope in 1609 and pointed it at the sky to get some useful observations. That’s next year’s celebration [2009], and I understand you’re all gearing up for IYA 2009. Great! It’s going to be a wonderful celebration, and wonderful to involve everyone with that.

How then do we go from the reform of the calendar to the Specola Vaticana, which is Italian for “Vatican Observatory.” The Italian word “specola” applies only to the ancient observatories, like the one in the Vatican and in Padua. The new ones are called Osservatorios. After the reform of the calendar by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, came a period in between, up to Father Angelo Secchi (1818-1878) in the mid-nineteenth century. In that period, astronomy happened for the Vatican in what was called the Roman College, which was the Vatican’s university in Rome. As part of the curriculum, astronomy was taught, and every now and then, an observatory was started. In the mid-nineteenth century, Father Angelo Secchi was the director of the Vatican Observatory, and he did some wonderful pioneering work. In observations of the sun, and of binary stars, and one of the things he’s mainly known for is looking at the spectra of stars and being able to sort out that they’re not all the same, and starting to classify them. So he was one of the early pioneers of spectral classification, the sorting of stars into boxes; the work, in fact, which I continue today, it so happens. [Father Secchi also discovered solar spicules and a comet. Secchi Crater on the moon is named after him.]

For Angelo Secchi, when he died, things were not well between the Vatican and the Italian government. The Italian government took over his observatory, because it was outside of Vatican territory, so the Vatican was without any observatory. Pope Leo XIII in 1891 reestablished the Vatican Observatory. The plan is simply that everyone might see that "the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible dedication". So that’s, in a nutshell, why Pope Leo reestablished the observatory, which has now sort of continued to the present time, though not in the same place.

That’s where Pope Pius XI comes in. Pius XI moved the observatory up from Vatican City behind St. Peter’s up to Castel Gandolfo in the mid 1930s. This was when the treaty was signed between Italy and the Vatican called the Lateran Treaty [1929], and so reestablished good relations between the Vatican and Italy. So the Pope was able to have extra territorial property, and so outside Rome, about 15 miles to the southeast, was Castel Gandolfo.

The Global Scourge of Light Pollution

Why did they move? Because the lights of Rome were getting turned on, and it was getting more difficult to do good astronomy from the Vatican. So to try to do some good astronomy, out they went to Castel Gandolfo, which has three domes: two rotate, because they have German Zeiss telescopes in them, a gift of Catholics in Germany when this observatory was moved in 1935. Another dome doesn’t move, because it was built by Bernini, for the local Church. The Papal property stretches along the side of the village, and there are some gardens where there are some more telescopes. There are reflectors and refractors, and there are two-telescopes-in-one, so the idea of binocular telescopes goes back a long way.

There’s a great sky out there [picture displayed]. This shows a color picture of the Green Flash, from Castel Gandolfo, and you can only get such pictures when you’ve got great sky conditions. In the early 1950s, color emulsion was getting sensitive enough to be able to take such pictures, and that was done by a Jesuit Brother, painstakingly photographing this phenomenon, proving that this wasn’t something that we simply have in our eye, but was actually a physical phenomena as the sun sets or rises, this final flash of green. We could talk about how to see it: a mountain helps, a horizon quite a distance away, and clear atmosphere, those are generally the conditions.

The newest telescope, built in the late 1950s, was a Schmidt telescope, with some wonderful prisms. The Schmidt was designed around taping prisms onto the top, and taking pictures, and if you do that, you get: lots of little rainbows. You can learn about spectral types and characteristics this way. This telescope did wonderful work, until the same thing happened that happened in the Vatican to us: the lights around Castel Gandolfo started to grow, particularly in the 1970s. So from Castel Gandolfo we, perhaps not so much moved, as established a second base, at the University of Arizona in Tucson. So, while keeping Castel Gandolfo as headquarters, we also have this research base in Tucson.

Keep the Dark Skies Good and Natural

Why Tucson? It is a great center of astronomy—great for observational astronomy because of the desert, the mountains, the sky conditions, and of course, not so many people, and so relatively dark skies. I hope you’re working to keep the skies good and natural around here. Yes?

So, in 1980 we added the resources at the University of Arizona, and it has been doing awfully well from then on. I don’t need to point out all the resources around Tucson: Kitt Peak, Mt. Graham, other places north and south of Tucson, the Catalina to the north, and the Smithsonian to the south with the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT), and I’ll bet a lot of you have visited that.

Lots of opportunities then, as Father Eusebio Kino, the Jesuit pioneer discovered in the late 17th century as he explored the place and established missions. If you look at his saddlebag, you’ll see the astrolabe that he used to plot his position and do his mapping. So he was actually the president of his astronomy club at Innsbruck [Austria, where he studied in his youth] when he was studying theology there—quite a heritage.

Kitt Peak: lots of great skies there, and I’ve done lots of my work there, on the 90-inch telescope. But, there’s nothing like having your own telescope. So, as we were coming into the 1980s, that is when the University of Arizona was pioneering a new way to make enormous glass for telescopes by spinning the molten glass to form the desired parabolic shape, and using a honeycomb structure to lighten the weight and make a huge mirror possible. This, then, is the prototype, the very first mirror ever spun-cast. It has a focus which is as far from the center of the mirror as the mirror is wide. So, it is a true f/1.0 primary mirror. This was offered to us to turn into a telescope, but because they knew they had to polish it to perfection—again, pioneering this stress-slat method of polishing the huge-sized mirror, perhaps not so much needed on a mirror of 1.8 meters, but certainly, as soon as you go to the bigger mirrors, yes, very much needed. So this mirror pioneered that [the larger mirrors].

That is how we entered this project, making the VATT, the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. And where to put it? Mt. Graham.

The Thumb Test

Why Mt. Graham? Well, do the “thumb test.” This is where you put your thumb up, close one eye, and cover the sun up with your thumb, and see the scattering of light around the sun. Do the same up on Mt. Graham, that’s the difference [picture displayed of the stark contrast]. That’s something you can do for yourself to show you how good the conditions are up on Mt. Graham. There are more refined tests that were done, obviously, and that were being done as I came here in 1984. Anyway, it turned out to be a great place to put a telescope.

This is our telescope mount being placed into position up on Mt. Graham [pictures displayed]. So, completing the “little-big” telescope in 1993, that’s getting its dome put on top, and you can see the optical support system there, and that’s the telescope, more or less complete.

The “Little-Big Telescope,” why do we call it LBT? Well, you saw “LBT-2,” folks [the Large Binocular Telescope, its giant neighbor on Mt. Graham]. This is what our engineers called it. It had the headaches of a big telescope, with that f/1.0 primary, that has a smaller mirror, but we had to solve the problems of making an f/1 telescope work before people would stand a chance of getting the thing up on the hill.

What do we do with the telescopes? I now want to give you a little run-through of the things that we are involved with at the Vatican Observatory, basically, from near to far. Solar System: meteorites and Kuiper Belt objects; Star and Galactic: clusters and nearby stars; Extragalactic: disk galaxies and mergers; and, of course, cosmology and the accelerating universe. Take your pick!

Let’s start with the solar system. Asteroids and Kuiper Belt objects, the asteroids are inside the orbit of Jupiter, between Jupiter and Mars. The Trans-Neptunian Objects, or Kuiper Belt objects, and, who knows, you may want to include Pluto in there.

How do you find them? Well, you take a series of images of a part of the sky, and see if anything moves. (If it moves, it ain’t a supernova.) And what do you do when you find these? Well, you then observe the thing for longer. This team, particularly for Kuiper Belt objects. So Steve Tegler and Bill Romanishin, and, in the early days, Terry Rettig, and myself.

What’s Great is Being Able to Have a Telescope

What do you do? As a Kuiper Belt object rotates, the amount of sunlight reflected by it varies, so its brightness is going to vary. You compare that Kuiper Belt object with nearby stars and then build up the light curve. With that light curve, you can tell all kinds of things. You can tell something about its shape, its rate of spinning, and its geometry. As well as, if you do color studies, what kind of Kuiper Belt object it probably is. So that’s what they sort of have been doing. Basically, this is one of their typical things: finding this 1998SM165 [Romanishin, W., Tegler, S. C., Rettig, T. W. , Consolmagno, G., And Botthof, B. "1998SM165: A Large Kuiper Belt Object with an Irregular Shape," 2001, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., 98, 11863-11866] and finding out all about it. But, other strange things can happen as well. You see this neat comet? Or, Kuiper Belt object, and something is happening, turning it into a comet? Well. It’s actually not. These two are separate objects, and by some observations that this team first did at VATT and then follow-up observations later on, I think a couple or three years ago, it solved that, in fact these are indeed two separate objects. There’s a nice center object, there, and there’s another periodic comet beside it, and they separated it. So, you can get fooled. But what’s great is being able to have a telescope, and you can go back and observe this thing, again and again, and sort out what’s really happening. If you don’t, you say, “Oh there’s some new thing in the sky.”

Aliens in the Vatican

Are there aliens in the Vatican? You know, the Vatican hides things, doesn’t it? Yes, sure there are aliens in the Vatican: two rare meteorite falls believed to come from Mars. Okay, so we do have some aliens there. The Vatican has a wonderful meteorite collection, donated by two French people, at least a century ago, who just loved collecting meteorites. They donated their collection to the Vatican, and it sat for a whole while, until Guy Consolmagno came along and realized that here was a great treasure. Though his study had been icy moons, he turned to studying meteorites, and studied their densities and porosities and whatever.

So, going a bit further, out and away from our solar system, going out into the galaxy, what we well know, currently anyway, is that our galaxy is this disk-shaped object with a bulge, and various older objects scattered around—the globular clusters. The globular clusters are interesting [M56 displayed]. Richard Boyle, one of our group, is, with colleagues, studying globular clusters and trying to get the existing Strömvil and Vilnius data with the next-generation Strömvil data set. What does that mean? These are filters through which you can see a part of the color of these stars. Working with certain filters they can predict quite well the characteristics of these stars. So that’s the idea. The problem is to do it accurately and enough to get the good predictions. I in turn then often do follow-up spectra on data that comes from this kind of study to see really whether the object is peculiar as the photometry data set indicates it will be peculiar. You also need spectroscopy, so that’s what I’ve been involved with.

Get to Know Your Neighbors

With some colleagues I’ve been involved with looking at our neighbors. It’s a good thing to get to know your neighbors, isn’t it? A good Christian thing; well, it’s a good human thing, to get to know your neighbors. So, it was actually inspired by NASA. They wanted a uniform database of stars near to the sun in order to pick out the ones most like our own Sun, on the assumption that they were the ones most likely to have planets—not the big giant ones, but planets like our own Earth. That’s obviously the quest, to find stars that have planets like our own Earth. We said, yes, it’s a great idea, and we’re interested in stars anyway, so sure, we will do this survey, a spectroscopic survey, principally. We gathered the photometric data on the stars from the catalogs, and then in some cases re-observed, and in some cases newly observed, all the nearby stars within a sort of hand’s reach out from our Sun, or 120 light-years, if that’s as far as your hand can reach, down to a certain smallness of star. We had 3,600 in our database. We have now published the results of two-thirds of that and hopefully, next year, we’ll have the final third out and published.

So, definitely getting to know the neighbors. It’s there on the Web, so you can go and get the spectra yourself, if you want to know the spectra. They’re all out and available, being a NASA project. We got some funds from NASA, which certainly helped get the services of Michael “Flip” McFadden, a great computer person, and also a good observer, for a few years.

    Spectra at http://stellar.phys.appstate.edu

What can you do with that? Well, one of the things we have done, we were asked, particularly Richard Gray and myself, was to help with a Spitzer Space Telescope project. This is the infrared telescope that was put a little way back from the Earth, trailing us in the orbit around the Sun, where it’s nice and calm and cool, to get the best infrared observations.

Earthlike Planets

The project we joined was to observe sixty-nine double-star systems with this telescope. We had observed, Richard Gray and myself, the spectra of these stars, and could predict from the spectra what these stars should look like through this Spitzer telescope, if they did not have any planetary material around them. So you then observe with Spitzer, looking at the characteristics of energy in the infrared, and see whether there are any characteristics showing there is dust. And, sure enough, there was. So, most of these stars had this kind of dust around them. Now, there are obviously various configurations, two stars very close together, two not so far together, and then two rather wide apart. This is 3 to 50 astronomical units (AUs), which is about the “giant planet distance” in our own solar system, and this is 50 to 500 AUs, and well beyond the “Pluto and beyond” distance; the astronomical unit being the distance between the Earth and the Sun, the Earth-Sun distance. So, three different scenarios. What this, indeed, did turn up, was that this debris material around the close ones, and then also not around the intermediate distance, but there was then some material around the very far apart ones. So, the answer is, because there are at least as many stars in doubles as there are in singles, in our neighborhood, there is plenty of opportunity for this planetary material, and so, maybe Earthlike planets.

Two Sunsets for the Price of One

[Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine displayed, with the two suns setting.] Does this remind you of anything? Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine and him seeing two suns setting. So his double sunset. Yes, this is very definitely something that could happen. So you can go to a nearby planet like one of these and enjoy two sunsets for the price of one. What fun.

Other things we can do as well, with this data set, it’s nice and uniform. Recent studies indicate stars with planets—exoplanets—tend to be slightly more metal-rich than other solar type stars. Metals are what we say are the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Remember, astronomers are very simple people; chemists have all kinds of elements, astronomers have only three: hydrogen, helium, and everything else that they call metals. That’s what we’re talking about here, because hydrogen and helium were made in the Big Bang. It was, originally, a controversial claim, but with our large sample size and accurate and homogeneous metallicities, or abundances, of the elements, we could address this problem definitively. And there it is, addressed definitively. What you have in this plot, or histogram, is the metallicity, or abundance of elements, with respect to our Sun. So our Sun would come somewhere in between those two in its abundance, at zero. The gray are all the field stars within this 120 light years, or forty parsecs. The red are the stars with planets in that bunch. What you can see is that the distribution is shifted into the higher-abundance region. Our own Sun comes pretty much midway in there. So our Sun, with respect to its neighborhood, has a little bit higher abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen or helium, the metals. But, it’s exactly normal compared with those stars in our neighborhood which we have found to have planets—the big giant gas planets, but at least planets, around them. So that’s one thing that comes out with great confidence. It helps to refine the search list for NASA; you do look in that higher-metallicity range. There’s another thing we took, as well, and that is the activity of the stars, which gives an indication of their age.

Galileo Chuckling Like Mad

So, anyway, all kinds of things. Dwarf stars: well, we live near one. These are fun. But, obviously, a star is part of a galaxy, and how galaxies as a whole form, is very much a question as well, and that’s being addressed by another part of our group. Our group’s very small, but it seems to cover it all. What I’m showing here is a conference on galaxy disks that was held in Rome in 200, and the principal people running this conference, were Father José Funes, and Enrico Corsini. José and Enrico had just finished their doctorates up in Padua—a good place for Galileo and all things astronomical—and obviously their work was in the disks of galaxies, or, galaxies with disks, and so they were much involved in running this conference. The conference took place in the big theology and philosophy place of the Vatican in Rome, and one wonders whether Galileo was sitting up in his grave and chuckling like mad.

Once is not enough. The second conference, again at the Pontifical Gregorian University was held last October [2007] and it was a great, successful conference with all kinds of people there and interactions going on. So, lots of success and you will be able to get the proceedings in a short while I understand, it’s in with the publishers now, so everyone’s got their papers in and it’s all ready. So, lots going on in disk galaxies.

The Dance of the Galaxies

So why are disk galaxies interesting? Well, because we now know that galaxies are not isolated universes. There’s a bunch of them there [picture displayed], run them through time, and this is what’s happened. This is courtesy of Hubble, this simulation. This is a mathematical model. You take particles and run them, just use gravity to make them interact, and see what’s happened, they don’t stay isolated; they dance. One can watch the dancing going on. You’re looking here really at the stars. There are all kinds of things happening with the gas and the dust as well. Later simulations have well shown that.

Is it fiction or is it true? Again these are observations that were done. This is from the Digital Sky Survey images of galaxies. These are the same galaxies observed up at our VATT telescope. Look carefully at the core of the galaxy, which looks like a single blob there. Now with special enhancing and filtering in the R or red filter, you can see there’s something going on in the cores. So, what has happened is that these galaxies have experienced the dance and the merger of other galaxies with them, and in their tummy, digesting, is the remnants of the smaller galaxies. So, nice meal! Galaxies do eat.

Something else that José has been involved in is this telescope that’s up in orbit. It’s ultraviolet and that’s why it’s beyond our atmosphere. So the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) mission is an all-sky survey with 5 arcseconds resolution, that’s a good resolution, in the ultraviolet. It’s looking at lots of galaxies, and very deep. It was launched April 2003.

GALEX and the Eleven Hugs

No, it’s not that Father José and the others are standing around giving each other hugs. It’s the 11HUGS (11Mpc Hα and Ultraviolet Galaxy Survey). The eleven megaparsec (Mpc), that’s distance, the H-alpha, that’s looking at the hydrogen-alpha line in the red, which gives an indication of star activity and formation, and the ultraviolet. So, 11HUGS.

What is it going for? All known galaxies with gas within eleven megaparsecs of the Ursa Major cluster, to quantify the star formation properties of galaxies. What’s going on, how do galaxies form, what’s then the processes of how they merge, the generations of stars within them. This then is one of the ultraviolet images from GALEX, and the same galaxy, now in the red, the hydrogen-alpha, and the R-filter, and you compare the two, and you get lots of grand theories going, of what’s happening. So, that’s the idea. You’ll have to get Father José along to talk about his galaxies and the HUGS. Unfortunately, he’s been appointed Director of the Vatican Observatory, and so spends much of his time at Castel Gandolfo keeping Cardinals happy.

Beyond Galaxies

Beyond galaxies are bunches of galaxies and the universe as a whole—what we call Cosmology. So, this is a supernova in the Hubble Deep Field. It was spotted in a later go at the Deep Field. Possible models of the universe: things started in the Big Bang, but then what happened after that? Do things expand and eventually contract? Sort of the decelerating universe. Does the expansion keep going on? Or is the expansion actually accelerating? Well, you know at least part of the answer to that now, but I say, be cautious, because there are still errors in these plots, and the work should go on. Some of the work has certainly been going on, up at VATT, because one of the members of the High-Z team comes there regularly and observes as part of his project to track down the supernova.

But really I wanted to introduce a couple of others in our observatory team. Bill Stoeger, with a disarming smile there, and Gabriele Gionti. Bill is from California, Gabriele is an Italian. Gabriele, before he joined the Jesuits did a thesis on quantum gravity. So he’s now exploring into things like string theory. Bill Stoeger did his PhD with people like Martin Reese and Stephen Hawking, so that’s his sort of company. What are they doing? They are investigating a number of processes relating to the origin and structure of the universe. So, including gravity into string theory, trying to see if string theory really can do the job, sums of many universes, the multi-universe theory, is there a way to get some observation that might indicate that this is really true, that we’re in a multiverse rather than a single universe. “Perturbation Equations with Dark Energy Inclusion” I got that from our annual report, and you’ll have to get Bill and/or Gabriele to tell you about it. Gabriele is starting his third year of theology in Berkeley. So hopefully, in a couple of years time he’ll be an ordained priest and then after that, come and join us full-time. He has spent a couple of years here in Tucson, around getting back into his quantum gravity work.

In The Beginning...

What does all this mean? So, the Interdisciplinary Studies. Allying the science with philosophy and theology, and what does it mean? I bring George Coyne up, he’s done lots of good science on very close binary systems. He’s retired from being Director of our observatory for a long time, but has managed to reflect on what does it all mean, “In the beginning,” and the bigger questions of all this. So that’s also a part, now, of our observatory work.

So what is the scope of the Vatican in astronomy, and in science? It’s really, The Universe. You know, basically, Christ’s Universe. We cover all the various things that we’ve been looking at: from nearby, solar system, stellar, galactic, and extragalactic, and cosmology. All this, yes, is done for the Vatican, in the name of the Vatican. Why? To show the Vatican’s, basically the Church’s, appreciation for science, and for this enterprise. And also, obviously, to say that this enterprise is something that should lift one up and help one understand one’s place in this Universe, and help one to wonder. And so perhaps I can finish with this picture of our own telescope up on Mt. Graham, taken with stars setting behind it, the telltale Orion constellation with those three stars in a line in the belt [see picture, below]. So as we look to the Heavens, we can think of the motto that Pius XI gave us when he moved us out of Vatican City to Castel Gandolfo in the mid-1930s. He gave this motto, which is on the side of the telescope wall up there on Castel Gandolfo:

“Deum Creatorem Venite Adoremus”

How’s your Latin? It means “Come and Adore God’s Creation.”

Question and Answer Session

Q: Has the Vatican provided a constant source of funding over the long history that you have revealed to us?

A: Yes, it has.

Q: On a percentage basis, what is it, approximately?

A: Let’s distinguish the telescope from our general operations, and our other scientific endeavors, and travels, and instrumentation as well, that’s about a million dollars a year, with our salaries in that. So I’d say it’s quite good value, given that there’s a dozen or so people involved. Our telescope, though, when we started to build it, the Vatican said, that’s wonderful, but we’d like you to get donations to build that and to maintain it. So that’s the situation at the moment. Our general operations, yes, beautifully funded by the Vatican; our telescope, no, we go out and find friends. Funny that you bring that up, I’ve brought some calendars and if anyone would like to help us, and purchase some, you are most welcome to. [$10 each] That sort of fundraising helps us to tell people about this work of the Church, and our own science and what fun we’re having.

Vatican Observatory Foundation

Q: Isn’t Castel Gandolfo also the Pope’s summer residence?

A: Exactly, it is the summer residence.

Q: Is there a connection between moving the observatory there and that being his summer residence?

A: The connection was that it was a suitable site outside of Rome. So when the Lateran Treaty was established and things were okay again between the Vatican and Italy, then Castel Gandolfo could be Vatican property and territory outside Vatican City itself. So it then became a suitable place with a great sky, as we saw with the green flash, at least up until the 1970s, to have an observatory.

Q: Does the Pope ever get involved? Does he ever observe?

A: The short answer is no. The last one who used to wander among the Jesuits observing was Pius XII. He could easily be called an amateur astronomer. He used to read books on astronomy, he certainly had one on his bedside. I think when he died they found a book by Gamow. I don’t know whether that helped him to go to sleep, or what. So he used to come out to chat. John Paul said, the observatory is great, but I’d like you to somehow celebrate the 300th anniversary of The Principia by Newton, and then we proposed to him that we would get into this interdisciplinary work, so philosophy and theology, and he said great, and that’s how that came about. Our present Pope Benedict, when he was Cardinal Rassinger, he used to take his office on a little trip to get away from Rome and have an outing and would take them around Castel Gandolfo and Father George Coyne would show them about the observatory, so he knows the observatory, as it were, from the inside as well.

Q: Do you see the greatest future in your work in the exoplanets?

A: Probably not. It could easily be some work that the telescope could be turned to. I myself wouldn’t be so interested in that, because the best way of finding them is not by spectroscopy, but by photometry, the variations in light, and I love working with the spectra of stars. So, my own work, no, but as a possible work for the telescope, yes, that could be. It’s a wonderful workhorse science telescope, so it’s wonderful for these sort of long-term monitoring projects.

Q: Could you clarify Father José’s recent remarks that it’s okay to believe in extraterrestrials?

A: Yes. It’s okay to believe in them. Does it surprise you?

Q: I was wondering what your opinion is.

A: Yes, I think the accent is “belief,” isn’t it. Because we’ve got no scientific evidence for extraterrestrials, so, it’s on the belief thing. Obviously the evidence is building up, from the astronomy, of the existence of planets, and most probably Earthlike planets, in some abundance, remember Tatooine, and all that. Even binary stars can have some planetary material around them, so the evidence is building up for planets around other stars. Biology is trying to come to grips with how life began, there was actually a History Channel program a couple months ago on that subject, it had at the end, no conclusion, but at least there were many pointers. Actually, George Coyne was on that program, and some other notable people. So, we are getting close, even with life, but it’s still, at the moment, a belief. As far as that, throughout the ages there have been people who have on one side said that we can’t possibly have life other than our own, and the others are saying, it’s abundant, it’s all there, it’s wonderful, you know, of course there is. And, so the same thing really has been happening in theology. You’ll find theologians saying, oh no, there’s real good reasons why we can’t possibly, you know, why we’ve got to be unique. And other theologians will say, hey, no, God is just abundant, abundant life, that really fits God beautifully, and you’ll see the two there. That’s why, it’s okay to believe in extraterrestrials. To believe.

Q: How did the collaboration between the Vatican and the University of Arizona come to be?

A: It came to be because George Coyne was, and has been for years, on the staff, on the faculty of the University of Arizona. He started in the Lunar and Planetary Lab and then migrated to Steward. When he was actually appointed Director, he was sitting on the Chair of Peter—in the sense: Peter Strittmatter who was the director of the observatory, and Peter took a sabbatical, and the interim director was George Coyne. So, a long-time good relation, especially with the two directors. We were looking in the 1970s very earnestly for another location for our Schmidt telescope, when we found that the nearest good location was the Canary Islands, La Palma. We said, eh, what do we do now? And then at that stage, George was appointed Director, and he said, well, maybe we establish a research base, you know, rather than move a telescope, we sort of have astronomers over here, and then use all the telescopes around, and that was our initial thing, not to have our own telescope. So that’s the kind of thing, as well as Father Martin McCarthy who is now Emeritus. I saw him a couple of weeks ago, he was in Boston. He had a long association with Kitt Peak, so would do work here for periods, as well as down in Chile with the director of the observatory down in Chile. So, connections, and we tried it as an experiment for three years in the 1980s. We presented the results of the experiment and the feedback that we got back from professional astronomers on it and presented that to the Vatican and they said, great, make it a permanent part of our setup, the two locations.

Q: The location of the Castel Gandolfo Observatory, is that a crater lake?

A: It is a very beautiful site. It is a volcanic crater lake. Lake Albano.

Q: How deep is the lake?

A: Short answer is very deep. You need a bathysphere to go down in it, you know, the deep-sea stuff. [Lake Albano is 170 meters (558 feet) deep.]

Q: Do you have any smog problem in that area?

A: Now, yes. In 1935, no. It’s about a 1,000-foot elevation there, so that really helps. The seeing in this period of summer (as opposed to Arizona that is the best time to observe), can get down to one arcsecond, so it’s great for that Schmidt telescope and taking the subjective prism spectra that rely on good seeing for the resolution, so a really good site.

Q: You said it was close to Rome, right?

A: Yes, that’s the problem now. And that’s why we’ve done the relocation of the observing part of it here to Tucson; Arizona in general. But, one needs to get back there for the wine, and strawberries.

The Vatican Observatory

The Spectra Data

The NStars Program, Abstract

VATT and the Billion-Dollar Space Mission

The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT) on Mt. Graham, Arizona, pictured with star trails from the setting constellation of Orion.

VATT and the Billion-Star Space Mission

In 2012, the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch Gaia, a space mission to measure one billion stars for a census of stellar population in our Milky Way galaxy. The spacecraft will chart the location and motions of the stars and look at them through a variety of filters to record their brightness and colors, all with unprecedented accuracy. This information is needed to clarify the origin and subsequent history of the Milky Way and to get a better picture of its three-dimensional structure.

In 2005, after about five years of studying which filters to use on Gaia, ESA announced its top choices. The winners include a set of seven filters based on the Strömvil Photometric System. The announcement was welcome news to Vatican Observatory astronomers Richard Boyle and Christopher Corbally. For many years Boyle and his collaborators have been using the Strömvil filters on the VATT to study the colors of hundreds of stars and to document the system’s performance. The researchers classify the stars based on the color data. Corbally then obtains spectra of certain stars to verify and further characterize those that seem interesting for studies of stellar and molecular cloud evolution.

ESA evaluated the Strömvil filters after one of Boyle’s collaborators—Vytautas Straižys with the Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy in Vilnius, Lithuania—proposed them for Gaia. The Vilnius institute is where the forerunner of the Strömvil system was developed.

While construction and testing of the spacecraft move to completion, Boyle and colleagues continue their VATT work with the Strömvil filters to provide calibration and preparation for the space mission. This work is key to attaining accuracy for the vast amount of star data to come from Gaia as well as from a new generation of giant ground-based telescopes being developed.



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