Garik Israelyan

Career Israelian has worked at the Institute of Astrophysics, Canary Islands (IAC) since 1997.

In 2001, he proposed the "Lithium-6 test" to determine if a star has engulfed a planet or other gaseous or solid matter. He and collaborators proposed that a solar-type star HD82943 with two giant planets has swallowed a massive planet or a large amount of small rocky matter.

In 2009, he and colleagues discovered that stars with planets, such as the sun, tend to have much less lithium.

Starsounds and Starmus

In 2005, Israelian compiled a library of acoustic sound waves produced within the bodies of stars. The concept of the Starsounds project was explained in Israelian's lecture "Our Acoustic Universe" at the first Starmus Festival and published in 2014 in the book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space.

At the first Starmus Festival, May and the band Tangerine Dream used the starsounds in their live performance of "Supernova", which opened a two-hour set, released on CD and digitally in 2013. In 2016 Brian Eno arranged some of Israelian's star recordings into a composition titled "Starsounds".

In a 2016 Larry King Now interview along with Stephen Hawking, Israelian explained the Starmus project and how he viewed music and arts as a natural way to inspire youth in science and astronomy — "I always thought that science inspired art, and art inspired science".

Awards

In 2010, Michel Mayor, Nobel laureate in Physics, Israelian, and Nuno Santos were awarded the Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize "or their important contribution in the study of relation between planetary systems and their host stars."

In 2014, Israelian received The Canary Islands Gold Medal, awarded by the government of the Canary Islands.

On 20 June 2016, the International Astronomical Union and the Minor Planet Center officially renamed asteroid (21057) 1991 GJ8 to Garikisraelian in honor of Israelian.