Across the ocean overlooking an idyllic lake, away from the lights of Rome, the Vatican, the seat of the Catholic Church, runs an observatory to study the cosmos. And this might very well lead to an obvious question: What is the Vatican doing with an observatory?
“It's a very odd thing, Vatican, having an observatory. Indeed, why, why isn't it doing things in church as one expects?,” the Rev. Chris Corbally said.
The Vatican isn't just the seat of the Pope, it's a state, Vatican City. So, like many countries, including ours, it has a national observatory of sorts, and theirs, like ours, was started for a practical reason: to reform the calendar inherited from Julius Caesar into the Gregorian calendar we all use today.
But, the work of the Vatican Observatory also continues today, and some of it happens closer to home.
“Let's remember that the Vatican Observatory is one institution in two locations,” Corbally said.
At Castel Gandolfo, right outside of Rome, and right here in our state, on top of Mount Graham in the middle of the desert in southern Arizona, where light pollution doesn't hinder the quality of their observations of the heavens.
Its Arizona location dates back to 1980, when the Vatican partnered with the University of Arizona to study the stars under our famously clear skies.
Father Corbally has been there almost since the beginning for more than 40 years, and he told me, while most people think of priests and think of someone engulfed in robes saying mass or baptizing babies, he's a priest and an astronomer. Corbally joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
FATHER CHRIS CORBALLY: So I do wear robes, celebrate mass, and, you know, baptize babies. So that's all part of it because I'm a priest in the Jesuit order. But, as you say, I'm also a scientist. When I finished my doctorate, which was in astronomy, the then director Father George Coyne said, “now Chris, where would you like to be based? Castle Gandolfo or in Tucson?” It was a no-brainer, Tucson, of course.
And in my first year, so springtime of my first year, the University of Arizona made its first new generation telescope mirror. So the mirror is the heart of telescopes which catch the light from the heavens and then sort of reflect it up and etc. So, that mirror was offered to the Vatican Observatory to make into a telescope. It still goes by its project name, which is Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. And so a very exciting project, I knew little about engineering, and I joined the team to make the telescope. Very exciting.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So you've been there for 40 years, right? Tell us a little bit about what you study. Like, what do you look at when you look through that telescope?
CORBALLY: So when I looked through that I was doing on Kit Peak, I look at the rainbows or spectra of stars. So you can obviously see them directly and see their light, but just as the sun has a rainbow, so each star has a rainbow as well. And if you look at it in detail, it's not so much the colors that you see, but the lack of them.
Well, the outer atmosphere of the sun is cooler than the center, and that absorbs light that is coming from the interior of the star. And how much is absorbed and which elements are doing the absorbing tells you about, I'd say the personality of the star.
GILGER: So, you have to explain what that means, like, what do you mean when you say a personality of a star? Give us an example of one that interests you.
CORBALLY: Well, it's surface temperature, how well packed it is, so what we call the surface gravity. So what's the gravity on the surface of a star? So that's really saying how, how big the thing is. And then it's composition, does it have the same kind of abundance of elements as our sun does? That's kind of the personality and the, you know, stars, most of them will fit quite happily, 90%, maybe be more fit nicely into slots, but then there will be ones that don't fit. Then there'll be ones that don't fit, so there we call them peculiar stars. Now we may call people peculiar, but all fascinating as some peculiar stars.
GILGER: What do you love about it?
CORBALLY: Well, I love, I find spectra beautiful, you know, I don't see them in color. I see them in, as it were, black and white initially when I was using photographic plates to take the spectra of stars, but now it's digital on the screen, so it's wiggles up and down in intensity and in, as it were, color or wavelength is the other dimension.
GILGER: So, I want to talk about the other kind of overarching question that probably looms over a lot of the work that you do and a lot of the questions people have about it, right? Like, just as most people wouldn't assume that a priest is also an astronomer, I'm guessing most people would assume that religion and science conflict, right? Like, that religion even denies science most of the time, or the other way around. Do you see that?
CORBALLY: I suppose the short answer is no, of course not. Our understanding that we gain of our universe, through science, is very much part of the overall truth, and if you like, you know, God is the truth with a capital T, and we have lots of truths with smaller T’s in all kind of branches that kind of bring together and are part of that overall whole big truth.
GILGER: Are there times though when these things butt up against each other, for you? Like when you cannot explain a religious belief with science, like a miracle or, you know, people know Jesus was supposed to have walked on water, right? Like, how do you kind of answer those questions?
CORBALLY: By saying there beyond science, precisely a miracle is something that science cannot explain. A healing is often the thing that's a miracle that's needed before the Catholic Church will declare someone a Saint, so a healing that cannot be explained by the doctors is a miracle. And these seem to happen, you know, and, and you can't explain it, the known medicine won't explain it.
GILGER: Are there examples like that in the astronomy world, things that you cannot explain and you might attribute to the divine?
CORBALLY: I don't think so. I think there's a scientific explanation, and people may or may not believe that explanation, but you know there is one. Part of the problem in the Bible was when the passage was saying, “well, the sun went backwards.” Well, you can't explain that. What actually was experienced at the time, and that's something we don't know.
GILGER: It's interesting to me that you keep saying, you know, “we just don't know,” or “this is something we cannot explain,” because to the outsider, at least, to someone who's not a scientist, right? Like that's the whole point of science is, to be able to explain those things to create the hypotheses and test it and say this is the answer. It sounds like, as a priest and a scientist, right, like you are willing to allow that to be unanswerable sometimes.
CORBALLY: Yeah, well, the same is true in science, you know, it was put to me by good scientists, under whom I studied, that in science, you're always asking questions and what you're doing is asking better questions. So, we're asking the same kind of questions to people from, you know, decades, centuries, whatever ago but we’re asking better questions now.
GILGER: Let me ask you lastly, I wonder this because of the work that you described that you do and the beauty of it and the beauty that you see in it. Are there moments that you have when you're looking at those spectra, when you feel that connection between the cosmos and the divine that you talked about?
CORBALLY: Same as anyone away from cities, when the moon is not bright in the sky and it's so it's really dark sky. The wonder gets, even to an astronomer, just the beauty of the heavens. Now again, astronomer have better questions about those stars to ask and more thing to wonder, you know, on the distances and the times involved and the energies involved in it all. But it's the same wonder there.
You know, when I'm looking at spectra, I'm kind of finding out what God knows about this particular star. Now, God knows in a different way than we do. I might call it, you know, classify it as such and such as this is a star like our sun, and God's knowledge is different from ours, but it's God's star, and I'm enjoying finding out about it. And ... as it's said, you know, same and different as God knows and understands this star.
