Dr Garik Israelian is an astrophysicist at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (Spain), since 1997. He is also the creative director and spiritual father of the STARMUS Festival.
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.
Professor Israelian has since worked as a lecturer and researcher in Utrecht (Netherlands), Brussels (Belgium), and Sydney (Australia).
He has published more than 250 scientific articles on subjects ranging from the discovery of extra solar planets, to the properties of low mass x-ray binaries with black holes and neutron stars.[2] Dr. Brian May credits Israelian in his PhD thesis as “… my prime collaborator in resuming this work … more than anyone else responsible for helping me through the final stages of this PhD work”.
In 1999 he led a collaboration reported in the journal Nature that found the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of black holes. 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 discovery was cited by Stephen Hawking on his lecture at Starmus II and also
discussed by Nobel Prize physicist Hans Bethe and reviewed by Dennis Sciama (PhD supervisor of Stephen Hawking) and collaborators.