Encounters in the Milky Way
Journey through our tight-knit stellar neighborhood into the bustling Milky Way to witness some of the chance encounters that have shaped the cosmos.
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“Encounters in the Milky Way” brings audiences on a time-traveling journey to witness some of the chance encounters that have shaped the destiny of the cosmos. Narrated by Pedro Pascal, this is the first AMNH Space Show to present the story of cosmic motion and how that impacts our solar system.
Reaching billions of years into the past and peering millions of years into the future, this time-traveling journey is made possible by data from one of the most transformative astronomical projects of the past century: the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission.
In addition to tracing the paths of stars, comets, interstellar debris, and visually stunning gas and dust clouds, “Encounters in the Milky Way” shows, for the first time, the dramatic merger of our galaxy with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy.
“Encounters in the Milky Way” was developed by the American Museum of Natural History, New York with the major support and partnership of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
P.S.: A planetarium as a place of scientific discovery? While preparing the show, the creators at the Hayden Planetarium in New York were fine-tuning a scene featuring the Oort Cloud, a giant swarm of icy bodies at the edge of the Solar System. Suddenly, a spiral resembling a small galaxy appeared before them on the dome. It wasn’t a visualization error: the data confirmed it, and the discovery of this internal spiral structure—shaped by the Galaxy’s gravity—was published in The Astrophysical Journal. Will you notice it in the show, too?
