Garik Israelian

Nominated by Swiss Academy of Sciences, Israelian, Michel Mayor (Co-laureate of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics) and Nuno Santos were awarded the 2010 Victor Ambartsumian International Prize for Astrophysics, Physics or Mathematics.

On 20 June 2016 the International Astronomical Union and the Minor Planet Center officially renamed asteroid 21057(1991 GJ8) to Garik Israelian in honor of Israelian. The citation was written by astronomer Joel Parker and Queen guitarist Brian May, and presented by them at the Starmus Festival.

In 2014, Israelian received The Canary Islands Gold Medal awarded by the Government of Canary Islands. This is the highest recognition on the Canary Islands awarded to people or companies for efforts for the benefit of the Canary Islands society.

Two hundred years after the original idea by John Michell regarding the existence of black holes in the Universe, Israelian led an international collaboration based on data collected with the 10m Keck telescope in Hawaii, which provided the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of black holes. This was cited by Stephen Hawking on his lecture at Starmus II. Also discussed by Nobel Prize physicist Hans Bethe and review by Dennis Sciama (PhD supervisor of Stephen Hawking) and collaborators. In 2001 he proposed the so-called "Lithium-6 test" aiming to check if a star has engulfed a planet or other gaseous or solid matter. An international team of scientists led by Israelian has provided the explanation of anomaly low abundance of lithium in the atmosphere of the Sun, and linked this fact with the presence of planets in the solar system.

2001-2003 Israelian gave 30 hours post-graduate course on Radiation Transfer, Stellar Atmospheres and Spectroscopy at the Universities of Tokyo, Japan and Geneva, Switzerland. Visiting professor at Caltech (2000), National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (2003), Observatory of Trieste (Italy) and more. Invited talks at more than 30 international conferences. In 2009 Israelian was invited to speak at TED Global in Oxford. In June 2016, Israelian appeared on Larry King Now with Stephen Hawking to discuss Starmus Festival, artificial intelligence, and cosmology.

Israelian has since worked as a lecturer and researcher in Utrecht (Netherlands), Brussels (Belgium), and Sydney (Australia). Since 1997 he has worked at the Institute of Astrophysics, Canary Islands (IAC), and as a professor at the University of La Laguna, Tenerife.

Garik Israelian (Armenian: Գարիկ Իսրայելյան , born 1963) is an Armenian-Spanish astrophysicist and scientist. Founder of Starmus Festival. He led the team which found the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of stellar mass black holes.

Garik Israelian was born in Yerevan, Armenia in 1963. He graduated from Yerevan State University in 1987 with a First Class Honors degree in Physics, and completed his PhD in 1992.

In 2011, Israelian founded the Starmus Festival. The Starmus International Festival is an international gathering focused on celebrating astronomy, space exploration, music, art, and allied sciences such as biology and chemistry. Since 2010 the advisory board of Starmus included Garik Israelian, Brian May, Stephen Hawking, Alexei Leonov, Peter Gabriel, Richard Dawkins, Jill Tarter, Jack Szostak (Nobel laureate), Harry Kroto (Nobel Laureate), Richard Dawkins, Robert Williams, Tony Fadell, David Eicher and Emmanuelle Charpentier. There were five festivals that featured Apollo astronauts, including Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell. Cosmonauts including Alexei Leonov, Yuri Baturin. Scientists Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Jill Tarter, Kip Thorne and many others. Musicians Brian May, Steve Vai, Hanz Zimmer, Rick Wakeman among others. The first Starmus Festival, "50 years in space", was a tribute to the pioneers of the space race focusing on a "Tribute to Yuri Gagarin", fifty years after his first ever space flight on April 12, 1961.