La Palma will host a new edition of Starmus in 2024, according to Rafael Rebolo, director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and Garik Israelian, co-director of the festival and astrophysicist, at a press conference held at the IAC headquarters in La Laguna.
"We are working to make this a reality and the way we have found is to relate it to the protection of the sky as an asset of humanity, which is why we will go hand in hand with the Starlight Foundation. There is still time to make society aware of the pollution of our sky, especially with the launch of small satellites, and we believe that Starmus is the right way to do this," said Rebolo.
For his part, Israleian pointed out that "the new edition of the festival on La Palma has to be a revolution for the island", a project that will once again place space at the centre of the theme. In this sense, he clarified that the organisation will start working on the La Palma edition once the funds allocated by the institutions involved have been signed.
The announcement was made during the world presentation of the documentary recorded during the last edition of Starmus in Armenia. Entitled "50 years on Mars", this audiovisual production summarises the sixth edition held in Yerevan (Armenia) in 2022, which had the Red Planet as its protagonist.
"This documentary has been an experiment for us, now the idea is to recover the material recorded on the islands and make a Canarian documentary. In addition, the experience in Armenia helps us to bring this festival model to La Palma; we want to involve all the people of La Palma", Israelian emphasised.
Three organizations have today agreed to work jointly to ensure that the island will be the next host to the Starmus Festival, an international multidisciplinary event which unites science, art, and music. The president of the Cabild of La Palma, Mariano Zapata, the councillor for Culture and Historic Heritage, Jovita Monterrey, the Director of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) Rafael Rebolo, and the director and founder of the Starmus Festival, Garik Israelian met today in Santa Cruz de La Palma and agreed to continue collaborating so that the next edition of the Starmus
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
