Formation | 2007 |
---|---|
Founder | |
Purpose | Educational, events |
Products | Festivals |
Fields | Science, astronomy |
Website | starmus |
The Starmus International Festival is an international gathering focused on celebrating astronomy, space exploration, music, art, and the natural sciences. It was founded by astronomer / amateur musician Garik Israelian and musician / astrophysicist Brian May. The festival has featured multiple well-known astronauts and astronomers.
The first festival took place from 20 to 25 June 2011 on Tenerife and La Palma, Canary Islands with the theme "50 Years of Man in Space." In 2014, the book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space was published covering the content of the festival. [1] [2]
The second festival occurred 22 to 27 September 2014, on Tenerife and La Palma, Canary Islands with the theme "Beginnings: The Making of the Modern Cosmos." The Government of Tenerife announced that the equivalent publicity value from Starmus Festival II (2014) exceeds 170 million euros and that the festival reached 2.4 billion people worldwide. [3]
The third festival took place in the Canary Islands, on Tenerife and La Palma from 27 June to 2 July 2016 with the theme of "Beyond The Horizon: A Tribute To Stephen Hawking". The festival featured numerous scientists and science communicators including Stephen Hawking, Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins, Brian May, and 11 Nobel laureates. [4] [5]
Starmus III held the inaugural awards ceremony for recipients of the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication. The award recipients (chosen by Hawking himself) were composer Hans Zimmer, physicist Jim Al-Khalili and the science documentary Particle Fever . [6]
The fourth festival took place in Trondheim, Norway, from 18 to 23 June 2017 with the theme of "Life and the Universe". The festival featured eleven Nobel Prize laureates and many astronomers, biologists, chemists, economists, astronauts and artists.
The Stephen Hawking Medal award winners were Neil deGrasse Tyson (science writing), Jean-Michel Jarre (music and arts) and The Big Bang Theory (films). [7]
The fifth festival took place in Zurich, Switzerland in June 2019 under the theme "A Giant Leap", dedicated to the first step of the man on the Moon. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon. The Stephen Hawking Medal was awarded to Elon Musk, Buzz Aldrin, Brian Eno and the documentary Apollo 11, screened during the festival for the first time in Europe. [8] [9]
The sixth Starmus festival took place 5–11 September 2022 in Yerevan, Armenia with the theme 50 Years on Mars, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the first landing on Mars. There were opening ceremonies and a concert on the first day. Around 50 scientists, Nobel laureates, engineers, cosmonauts, musicians and artists took part in festival events. Starmus VI hosted a Science Camp "to enable children and people interested in science to more closely get acquainted with the latest scientific and technological achievements." [10] [11]
Premiering at the festival was the documentary film Space Inside about the Soviet and Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. The 80-minute film is based on Leonov's last interview and includes footage from the Soviet history of space exploration. [12] A composition dedicated to the topic of Mars exploration was performed at the closing of the festival; the neo-symphony "March of Mars" by Tigran Jager. [13]
Winners of the Stephen Hawking Medal were announced as Brian May, Jane Goodall, Diane Ackerman and the NASA Communications Unit. [14]
The seventh festival took place 12 to 17 May 2024 in Bratislava, Slovakia with the theme "The Future Of Our Home Planet". [15] A concert on the first day featured performances by Jean-Michel Jarre and Brian May, light and laser displays, and a drone ballet for an audience of 100,000 by the SNP bridge. [16] They were accompanied by the musicians Claude Samard, Adiescar Chase, Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra and Slovak Philharmonic Choir. [17]
Some famous expert speakers of the festival program were anthropologist Jane Goodall, Nobel Prize winners Michel Mayor, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Kip Thorne, and former astronauts Charlie Duke, Chris Hadfield, Kathryn Thornton and Garrett Reisman. [18]
The Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication was awarded to Laurie Anderson, Christopher Nolan, David Attenborough and Sylvia Earle. [18]
Two Sonic Universe Concerts were held at the Magma Arte & Congresos arena in Tenerife. The 2011 concert was recorded and produced into a CD entitled Starmus - Sonic Universe. [19] The rock band Nosound recorded their 2014 concert performance and produced a CD/DVD set entitled Teide 2390. [20]
Jean-Michel André Jarre is a French composer, performer and record producer. He is a pioneer in the electronic, ambient and new-age genres, and is known for organising outdoor spectacles featuring his music, accompanied by vast laser displays, large projections and fireworks.
Oxygène is the third studio album by French electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre. It was first released in France in December 1976 by Disques Motors, and distributed internationally in 1977 by Polydor Records. Jarre recorded the album in a makeshift studio that he set up in his apartment in Paris, using a variety of analog and digital synthesizers, and other electronic instruments and effects.
Alexei Arkhipovich Leonov was a Soviet and Russian cosmonaut, Air Force major general, writer, and artist. On 18 March 1965, he became the first person to conduct a spacewalk, exiting the capsule during the Voskhod 2 mission for 12 minutes and 9 seconds. He was also selected to be the first Soviet person to land on the Moon although the project was cancelled.
Claude Nicollier is the first astronaut from Switzerland. He has flown on four Space Shuttle missions. His first spaceflight (STS-46) was in 1992, and his final spaceflight (STS-103) was in 1999. He took part in two servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope. During his final spaceflight he participated in a spacewalk, becoming the first European Space Agency astronaut to do so during a Space Shuttle mission. In 2000 he was assigned to the Astronaut Office Extravehicular Activity Branch, while maintaining a position as Lead ESA Astronaut in Houston. Nicollier retired from ESA in April 2007.
Jill Cornell Tarter is an American astronomer best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Tarter is the former director of the Center for SETI Research, holding the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute. In 2002, Discover magazine recognized her as one of the 50 most important women in science.
Rendez-Vous is the eighth studio album by electronic musician and composer Jean-Michel Jarre released on Disques Dreyfus, licensed to Polydor, in 1986. The album art was created by long-time collaborator Michel Granger.
Joseph Ivor Silk FRS is a British-American astrophysicist. He was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011.
David John Eicher is an American editor, writer, and popularizer of astronomy and space. He has been editor-in-chief of Astronomy magazine since 2002. He is author, coauthor, or editor of 23 books on science and American history and is known for having founded a magazine on astronomical observing, Deep Sky Monthly, when he was a 15-year-old high school student.
Jack William Szostak is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, University Professor at the University of Chicago, former Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres.
Stephen William Hawking, was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.
The Auditorio de Tenerife "Adán Martín" is an auditorium in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain. Designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, it is located on the Avenue of the Constitution in the Canarian capital, and next to the Atlantic Ocean in the southern part of Port of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Construction began in 1997 and was completed in 2003. The auditorium was inaugurated on 26 September of that year in the presence of Felipe, Prince of Asturias, and was later visited by former U.S. President Bill Clinton. The building is framed within the tenets of late-modern architecture of the late 20th century.
The Symphony of Science is a music project created by Washington-based electronic musician John D. Boswell. The project seeks to "spread scientific knowledge and philosophy through musical remixes." Boswell uses pitch-corrected audio and video samples from television programs featuring popular educators and scientists. The audio and video clips are mixed into digital mashups and scored with Boswell's original compositions. Two of Boswell's music videos, "A Glorious Dawn" and "We are All Connected", feature appearances from Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, and Stephen Hawking. The audio and video is sampled from popular science television shows including Cosmos, The Universe, The Eyes of Nye, The Elegant Universe, and Stephen Hawking's Universe.
Garik Israelian is an Armenian-Spanish astrophysicist and co-founder of the Starmus Festival. In 1999, Israelian and colleagues presented the first observational evidence that supernova explosions were responsible for the formation of stellar-mass black holes.
51 Degrees North is a 2014 science-fiction film written and directed by Grigorij Richters and starring Moritz von Zeddelmann, Steve Nallon, Jamie Doyle, Dolly-Ann Osterloh, and Steven Cree. The film is visually presented as found footage shot from the perspective of various video recording devices, primarily from a handheld camcorder operated by the main characters and from CCTV cameras and social media. The original soundtrack was composed by Queen and Brian May.
Grigorij S. Richters is a film director, public relations expert, activist, producer and official Forbes Council member. He directed the feature film 51 Degrees North and co-founded the global awareness movement Asteroid Day with astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian May. Richters was Kevin Spacey's filmmaker-in-residence at the Old Vic Theatre and activist Stephen Sutton's documentarian before Sutton's death in 2014. He filmed and produced his first documentary at the age of 11. He also walked from Paris to Berlin to advocate for refugee children who are stuck in Greek refugee camps. In 2022, he founded XWECAN, a PR and Communications agency. He has worked with the likes of King Charles III, Keira Knightley and Whoopi Goldberg.
The Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication is an honor bestowed by the Starmus Festival to individuals and teams in science and the arts to recognize the work of those helping to promote the public awareness of science.
Nemra is an Armenian rock band established in 2012 in Yerevan. Led by songwriter Van Yeghiazaryan on vocals and guitar, Vaspur Yeghiazaryan on bass and backing vocals, keyboardist and backing vocalist Marianna Karakeyan, and drummer Marek Zaborski. The band's music draws from the alternative and indie rock genres. They also perform cover versions of Armenian folk songs.
ArmCosmos, commonly known as the Armenian Space Agency, is an Armenian private agency responsible for the development of Armenia's commercial space industry, coordinating domestic activities, identifying opportunities and facilitating international space engagement, on behalf of the Government of Armenia. Its headquarters are located in Yerevan, Armenia.