The Starmus Festival will turn Tenerife Island in the venue for astronomy and space science
The island will host between the 21st and the 26th of March, 2011, this international event that will bring the public closer to the multiple dimensions related to the study of the stars.
‘Discover the cosmos and change the world’ are two of the premises of the Starmus Festival that will take place in Tenerife Island between the 21st and the 26th of March, 2011. This international event will turn the island in the epicentre of astronomy and space science. The festival counts with the support of the Canary Astrophysics Institute (IAC) and it has as main goal to bring closer to the people the different dimensions in the study of the stars combining science with art and music.
Attendees will learn more about extraterrestrial life and the future of the space race by the hand of prominent researchers in this field, including several Nobel winners and key personalities in the history of space as the astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Valentina Tereshkova.
The participants will also take a look at the artistic side of astronomy, astrophotography and space through art exhibitions and the music of Tangerine Dream which will be working for the first time with the actual sounds emitted by celestial bodies.
The idea for this festival was developed by the researcher from the IAC Garik Israelian. The Starmus Festival will also honor the figure of Yuri Gagarin on the 50th anniversary of his achievement. The flight of the spacecraft Vostok 1 will be remembered by his fellows Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut, and Alexei Leonov, the first man to perform a spacewalk.
The festival will count with the presence of other personalities such as the former NASA astronaut Aldrin, who shared a moonwalk with Neil Armstrong in 1969, and his partner Bill Anders, who immortalized on board the Apollo 8 one of the iconic images of the twentieth century: the Earthrise photograph, which shows Earth rising above the Moon.
The organizers will not only offer the living memory of those days, but also documentary samples Soviet secret archives. The tribute to Gagarin will be one of the main activities of the Starmus Festival with the lecture series’ Discover the cosmos and change the world.
For three days, prominent researchers will address issues ranging from the classic question of whether extraterrestrial life exists to global warming or the analysis of the relationship between religion and exobiology.
This tour through the great themes of astronomy includes lessons about black holes delivered by the scientist Kip Thorne Caltech, or a lecture on exoplanets delivered by its discoverer Michel Mayor, who is a researcher at the University of Geneva.
The series also includes papers of the president of the International Astronomical Union, Robert Williams, the Nobel Prize in Physics 2009, George Smith, and the musician and astrophysicist Brian May, who will be setting out the question ¿what are we doing in space?
