The Hamilton Spectator

Jesuit Names, Written In Stars

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

ROME — Centuries after the Holy See muzzled Roman Catholic stargazers for questioning the centrality of the Earth in the cosmos, Jesuit astronomers from the Vatican’s in-house observatory are increasingly writing their names in the heavens.

The Vatican, led by Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pope, recently announced that three more Jesuit scientists from its Jesuit-run observatory had asteroids named after them as part of a fresh batch that included the 16th-century pope who commissioned the Gregorian calendar and a Tuscan pastry chef whose hobby is the firmament.

Jesuits have had more than 30 asteroids assigned to them since the space rocks began to be formally named in 1801. That “should not be surprising, given the often scientific nature of this community,” said the astronomer Don Yeomans, who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and is now part of the group that gives official approval for the names given to asteroids.

The three astral Jesuits named recently are the Reverend Robert Janusz, a Polish priest and physicist who focuses on measurements of light from star clusters (565184 Janusz); the Reverend William R. Stoeger (1943-2014), an American priest (551878 Stoeger);

and the Reverend Johann Georg Hagen (1847-1930), an Austrian American who, per the naming citation for 562971 Johannhagen, “devised several ingenious experiments at the Vatican to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth, directly confirming the theories of Copernicus and Galileo.”

All three work or worked in the Specola Vaticana, or Vatican Observatory, just off the papal gardens at Castel Gandolfo, a short drive from Rome. The observatory is a descendant of centuries of Vatican-sponsored research into the stars and is the only Vatican body that carries out scientific study.

The history of the observatory, which has been staffed by Jesuits since the 1930s, is a rebuttal to the notion that the Roman Catholic Church has always sought to stand in the way of scientific advancement, an idea perpetuated by high-profile cases like those of Galileo and Giordano Bruno at the hands of the Inquisition during the Renaissance.

“There are institutions like the Pontifical Academy of Science that tell the Vatican what’s going on in the world of science, but we actually do the science,” said Brother Guy Consolmagno, an asteroid honoree (4597 Consolmagno) and director of the observatory. In a 2017 interview with The New York Times, Brother Consolmagno said that part of the mission of the observatory was “to show the world that the church supports science.”

A former director of the observatory, the Jesuit astrophysicist Reverend George V. Coyne, who died in 2020, played a significant role in getting the Vatican to shift position and formally acknowledge in 1992 that Galileo might have been correct.

“One thing the Bible is not,” Father Coyne told The New York Times Magazine in 1994, “is a scientific textbook. Scripture is made up of myth, of poetry, of history. But it is simply not teaching science.”

The Specola’s roots date to Pope Gregory XIII, who built an observatory, known as the Tower of the Winds, inside the Vatican so that astronomers could study the reform of the Julian calendar, which was in use until 1582. Gregory, also known as Ugo Boncompagni (1502-1585), now has an asteroid named after him, 560794 Ugoboncompagni.

Among the astronomers who worked on the reformed calendar was a Jesuit, Christopher Clavius (1538-1612) — asteroid 20237 Clavius — who lived at the Roman College, a school in the Italian capital started in 1551 by Saint Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the order.

The Roman College formed generations of astronomers, including Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) — asteroid 122632 Riccioli — who published a map of the moon in 1647 and codified some of the lunar nomenclature that is still in use. When Neil Armstrong said: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed,” on the 1969 Apollo 11 moon mission, “Tranquillity” was a reference to the Mare Tranquillitatis, or Sea of Tranquillity, which Riccioli had named.

The observatory’s current astronomers mostly split time between Castel Gandolfo and Mount Graham, Arizona, where the Vatican operates a telescope in partnership with the University of Arizona.

As Jesuits, “because we truly believe that God is the one who put everything there, it puts us in a very different relation with the thing we are observing,” said the Reverend Jean-Baptiste Kikwaya Eluo, who works at the observatory and has an asteroid named after him: 23443 Kikwaya.

The naming of asteroids is overseen by a group of professional astronomers, the Working Group for Small Bodies Nomenclature, part of the International Astronomical Union. It is presented every month with a list of proposed names and citations, but only 3.8 percent of the 620,000 numbered asteroids have been named, following specific guidelines.

Gareth Williams, the secretary of the group, said it tends to “strongly discourage” naming asteroids after religious figures. But the current crop of Jesuit astronomers “were not named because they were Jesuits, they were named because they were astronomers,” he noted.

In the latest batch, asteroid 44715 was named Paolovezzosi, for Paolo Vezzosi, an amateur astronomer and pastry chef from Montelupo Fiorentino, in Tuscany. Mr. Vezzosi, according to the citation, “provides delicious cakes” at outreach events.

He was nominated by Maura Tombelli, president of an astronomy group that funded and built a public observatory in Montelupo Fiorentino. Ms. Tombelli has discovered 200 asteroids (asteroid 9904 is named Mauratombelli).

Nominating Mr. Vezzosi was to thank him for helping to get the observatory off the ground, Ms. Tombelli said: “We had nothing else to give, just my rocks in the sky.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES / INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

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2023-04-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-04-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://thespec.pressreader.com/article/282076281133933

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