Encounters in the Milky Way expands humanity’s knowledge and understanding of the universe (photo by Alvaro Keding/© AMNH)
ENCOUNTERS IN THE MILKY WAY
American Museum of Natural History
Hayden Planetarium, Rose Center for Earth and Space
Central Park West at 81st St.
Open daily, $18-$30
212-769-5200
www.amnh.org
Everything I know about space I learned from Star Trek, Stanley Kubrick, Carl Sagan, and the American Museum of Natural History. At the Hayden Planetarium, the institution continues to explore the final frontier and push the boundaries of our knowledge of the universe in its space shows, which have included 2000’s Passport to the Universe, narrated by Tom Hanks; 2002’s The Search for Life: Are We Alone? (Harrison Ford); 2006’s Cosmic Collisions (Robert Redford); 2009’s Journey to the Stars (Whoopi Goldberg); 2013’s Dark Universe (Neil deGrasse Tyson); and 2020’s Worlds Beyond Earth (Lupita Nyong’o).
In the brand-new Encounters in the Milky Way, the ubiquitous Pedro Pascal, of The Mandalorian, The Last of Us, and Narcos, takes audiences deep into our galactic neighborhood as scientists uncover surprising aspects of time and cosmic movement so unexpected that it shocked even the filmmakers. To the everyday museum visitor who just hasn’t been thinking about our universe lately, Encounters is a thrilling, jaw-dropping reminder of exactly how small we humans are in space and time, and how much remains to be explored.
“There was this day that happened, I can tell you it’s an actual day, April 25, 2018. That was the day that the European Space Agency’s Gaia Observatory . . . revealed this massive, amazing map, a map that is foundational in astrophysics. On April 24, I gave a talk in here to a sold-out crowd and I told this audience — I don’t know, they thought that I was on the Kool-Aid or something — I was, like, it all changes tomorrow,” AMNH curator Jackie Faherty said at the press preview of the twenty-four-minute film. “It’s all changing because up until that moment we had about 116,000 stars that we measured the distances to and that we knew their motion really well. But the next day we were getting nearly 2 billion. So to me, the most important thing and why this is happening now is because on April 25, 2018, Gaia dropped a map that all humans should be proud of. We mapped the cosmos in a way, and the Milky Way really was the star of it, we had never been able to do before. And because of that, that was the sheer inspiration for starting the conversations about this show. And we could test out some of the material with audiences in here with open space. But because of Gaia — sometimes I call this show a little love letter to Gaia because that map is so phenomenal.”
Encounters in the Milky Way was a huge undertaking, made with the participation of a wide range of astronomers, educators, science visualization experts, and artists from the University of Surrey, NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, the Southwest Research Institute, the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian, Technische Universität Berlin, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, the European Space Agency, and more than a dozen other organizations. Using the Gaia space telescope, the James Webb Space telescope, and complex digital models, the film features the Kuiper Belt, the Oort Cloud, Gliese 710, icy comets, a local bubble, and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy like they’ve never been seen before. As with all space shows, the visuals are spectacular, highlighted by a spiral, found in collaboration with the Czech astronomer David Nesvorný, that jolted all involved.
“There’s this huge universe out there, and this show is concentrating on the Milky Way. . . . Because we’re being parochial, local to the Milky Way, there’s that emphasis of time, but it’s brought home to us in a kind of personal way that just as the solar system is our home, so too is the Milky Way,” director Carter Emmart, helming his seventh and final show, said. “And because we can see it organically behaving in great detail like this, there’s an aspect to it that, yes, it’s so far out there, and the time scales are so large, but then when Pedro tells you that we are twenty galactic years old and that it takes us 230 million years to make one orbit — when we were at this last orbit, it was the Triassic, and dinosaurs were just getting their legs — that’s one of the twenty orbits. It makes you understand that our story is a larger story of life and that while we are single instances, that the DNA of your children and the grandparents and so forth that you come from is a continuum, and that goes back into deep time. . . . I really feel that message comes across in this story; I hope it does. I hope that’s the takeaway, that this is a vast story. . . . For me its been a tremendous exhilaration from being ten years old, my mom bringing me to classes in the basement of this planetarium, to having a career working here. It’s been a great, great pleasure to be here across these various shows but end on something that I think is a pretty special production. It certainly is to me.”
In the film, Pascal explains, “By moving through space to observe from multiple angles, Gaia has built a three-dimensional atlas containing nearly two billion stars. That’s fifteen thousand times more than were ever mapped before, and about a million times more stars than we see with the naked eye. Could the ingredients of life be carried from one star system to another, aboard a comet or asteroid? Scientists are studying the possibilities. For us — for our sun and solar system — one orbit takes 230 million years to complete. So far, we’ve made about twenty orbits. We’re twenty galactic years old!”
The Milky Way’s collision with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy has never been visualized before (photo © AMNH)
It’s also special to Faherty, whose excitement and sense of wonder are infectious, particularly when it comes to the map.
“I want kids coming here and being like, What’s up with this map? I’d like to see more on that map. What else does that map have? Open up the map; look for stuff,” she continued. “I’m showing you the globe, guys — this is the map, the map of your cosmos. It’s your cosmos as well; it’s humanity’s map. Go play with the map. All Gaia data is available for everybody. Look at where these stars are; look at where they’re going. You can make discoveries — so much science to be had. I hope that people walk away wanting to be scientists when they leave this room.”
On Wednesday, June 25, Faherty and Emmart will be back in the room for “Astronomy Live: The Making of a Space Show,” sharing insights into the creation of Encounters in the Milky Way. Be prepared to reconsider your current career and think about becoming a scientist yourself after you experience their unbounding enthusiasm and childlike joy at expanding our knowledge of the endless universe.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]