Invited speakers at STARMUS debated in La Palma about the threat by asteroids, climate change, and scientific education.

The installations, when built, will serve to boost the island of La Palma as a tourist destination for those interested in the Science and the Astronomy developed in the Archipelago by the IAC and the Canary Observatories

The cosmologist and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who was recently named Honorary Professor of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) was the key figure of the first session, -moderated by Brian Cox, physicist and science popularizer on the BBC- on the third day of the Starmus Festival in Tenerife. In his talk, with the title “A brief History of Mine” he began by describing his childhood, and his years at school and at university, until he obtained his studentship at Cambridge, to study for his PhD in cosmology. He explained that during his student years “they diagnosed my

These results, published by a team led from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, and obtained using the OSIRIS instrument on the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC), will help us to understand the evolution of this type of objects.

The sessions of the second day of the Starmus festival, moderated by the astrophysicist Jill Tarter, Director of the SETI project, began with a talk by the Nobel Laureate for 2011 in Physics, Brian Schmidt who, together with Adam Reiss and Saul Perlmutter, discovered that the universe is in a state of accelerating expansion. Schmidt, for whom “the power of astronomy is that it lets us look directly into the past”, talked about the “dark” dark universe, referring to the dark matter (26%) and the dark energy (69%) of the universe. In his talk, he explained how he arrived at the conclusion that

Scientifics from the Instituto Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) participate in a study whose results shows how cosmic gas triggers stellar birth in galaxies. This process, which is very difficult to observe, could explain the formation of the Milky Way.