Garik Israelian

Garik Israelian (Armenian: Գարիկ Իսրայելյան, born 1963 or 1968) is an Armenian-Spanish astrophysicist and founder of the Starmus Festival. He and colleagues found the first observational evidence that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of stellar-mass black holes. 

Garik Israelian was born in Yerevan, Armenia, in 1963 or 1968. He graduated from Yerevan State University in 1987 with a First Class Honors degree in Physics and completed his Ph.D. in 1992.

Since 1997, Israelian has worked at the Institute of Astrophysics, Canary Islands (IAC), and has also worked as a lecturer and researcher at Utrecht University, the Free University of Brussels, and the University of Sydney.

Israelian has published over 500 articles. In 1999, he and colleagues found the first observational evidence, based on data from the W. M. Keck Observatory, that supernova explosions are responsible for the formation of black holes.

In 2001, he proposed the so-called "Lithium-6 test" to determine if a star has engulfed a planet or other gaseous or solid matter. In 2009, he and colleagues discovered that stars with planets, such as the sun, tend to have much less lithium.