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.

The third edition of the Starumus festival began this aftenoon in Tenerife with the welcome address of Garik Israelian, IAC researcher, founder and director of Starmus, who said that the motto of the festival this time is Beyond Starmus "because it is a special event in honour of Stephen Hawking". He was followed by Rafael Rebolo, the Director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) who made the point that "we are very proud of the work of Stephen Hawking, and for that reason we have named him Honorary Professor of the IAC". He also stressed the potential of the Canary Islands for

The writer and journalist from Madrid, who has participated in the multidisciplinary project at the IAC "En un lugar del Universo...", has described as "marvellous" her experience visiting the Canary Island Observatories, and thinks that "everyone should be obliged to do this at least once in their lives"