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Let internet boyfriend Pedro Pascal be your guide on a tour of the universe. The famous actor is the narrator for a new space show at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium titled Encounters in the Milky Way.
The show debuts on Monday, June 9, but we got a sneak peek today. Encounters in the Milky Way takes a 20-minute voyage through outer space with stunning visualizations of dazzling stars, constellations and planets. Stirring music complements Pascal's narration, and you'll even feel your seats move as if you could blast off to space yourself.
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"On a clear night," Pascal says in opening the show, "a band of light stretches across the sky. The combined glow of billions of stars, partially obscured by great clouds of gas and dust: the majestic Milky Way. From Earth, it looks like we are at the center, and all these stars were all around us, but as astronomers learn to decipher celestial movement, we found our place in the cosmos."
From there, Encounters in the Milky Way continues to explore movement: How Earth spins on its axis, giving us day and night; how seasons change; how constellations move over time; how even the Sun is part of this galactic migration.
Encounters in the Milky Way, the Hayden Planetarium's seventh space show, is the first to focus on the story of this cosmic motion and how it impacts our solar system. While the show is a visual treat, it is based on firm scientific research, such as the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, which mapped nearly 2 billion stars in the Milky Way, and NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which offers stunning views of galaxies millions of lightyears away.
Astronomers, educators, science visualization experts, and artists worked together to create the show. For the first time in the history of the Hayden Planetarium Space Shows, a discovery was made during the production process. While fine-tuning a simulation of the Oort cloud, a vast expanse of icy material left over from the birth of our Sun, the Encounters in the Milky Way production team noticed a clear shape: a structure made of billions of comets that looked like a spiral-armed galaxy. This simulation revealed a cosmic structure that was previously unknown, and details about the finding were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.
As Jackie Faherty, senior research scientist in the museum's Astrophysics Department, explains it, researches theorized what Oort clouds look like, explored models and examined data. Then all of a sudden, they discovered a never-before-seen spiral shape. "Pop goes the orc cloud," she said during a preview event for the show. "There's so much to discover there."
Perhaps viewers of Encounters in the Milky Way will someday make their own scientific discoveries. To Carter Emmart, the museum's director of astrovisualization, the immersive nature of the show helps fire up kids' imaginations.
Wonder is a gateway to inspiration, and inspiration is a gateway to motivation.
"If this museum is a testament to anything, it's a testament to wonder," Emmart said at the show's preview. "I think wonder is a gateway to inspiration, and inspiration is a gateway to motivation."