a blog for j z dot net

The Vatican, along with the University of Arizona, are in collaboration with one of the world’s premier telescopes at the Mount Graham International Observatory (MGIO) about a dozen miles southwest of Safford Arizona.  MGIO is a division of Steward Observatory, the research arm for the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.  The facility on top of Mt. Graham consists of three telescopes:

• Large Binocular Telescope Observatory (LBTO)
• Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope (VATT)
• Heinrich Hertz Submillimeter Telescope (SMT)

From the Vatican Observatory website‘s page on “The Galileo Affair” they actually have the gall to claim:

Many theories have been put forth over the years to explain why Galileo came into conflict with the Church. The mystery arises precisely because Galileo actually stood squarely in the long history of the Church’s support of science.

Only an institution so steeped in delusion, myth and newspeak / newthink would make such an outlandish claim of revisionist history.  The Church was Galileo’s ally??  The same church which condemned him for his “vehement suspicion of heresy” and gave him house arrest for the remainder of his life, all for his correct claims on heliocentrism.

Are we to expect that it’s acceptable that the Vatican is the group behind the funding this type of research? With their rather storied history of fact-suppression (and worse) it seems to make little sense to have such an institution doing this type of (or arguably any scientific) research.  The Vatican’s long involvement in certain areas of science is truly troubling – these are the same folks who are largely responsible for the ravages of AIDS in the third world, the genocide of entire native populations, and who feel it is their “righteous calling” to wipe out and eradicate certain cultures and traditions.  The Vatican seems to be no friend of science, and it’s hard to imagine just what they are funding with this type of research.

From an Italian Ministry of Education, Universities and Research paper, entitled “On the anomalous secular increase of the eccentricity of the orbit of the Moon” (download as pdf)

A recent analysis of a Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) data record spanning 38.7 yr revealed an anomalous increase of the eccentricity e of the lunar orbit amounting to e˙meas = (9 ± 3) × 10⁻¹² yr⁻¹.  The present-day models of the dissipative phenomena occurring in the interiors of both the Earth and the Moon are not able to explain it.

Thus, the issue of finding a satisfactorily explanation for the anomalous behaviour of the Moon’s eccentricity remains open.

A promising candidate for explaining the anomalous increase of the lunar eccentricity may be, at least in
principle, a trans-Plutonian massive body of planetary size located in the remote peripheries of the solar system.

Uhm.. Ok.