Travel from First Stars to the Center of the Sun.
Journey to the Stars, narrated by Academy Award-winning actress Whoopi Goldberg, features extraordinary images from telescopes on the ground and in space and stunning, visualizations of physics-based simulations. This dazzling space show launches visitors through space and time to experience the life and death of the stars in our night sky, including our own nurturing Sun. Tour familiar stellar formations, explore new celestial mysteries, and discover the fascinating, unfolding story that connects us all to the stars. Those who come along for the journey may never see the night sky in the same way again.
Journey to the Stars is an engrossing, immersive theater experience created by astrophysicists, scientific visualization, and media production experts from the American Museum of Natural History with the cooperation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and more than 40 leading scientists from the United States and abroad. The Space Show takes viewers 13 billion years into the past, when the first stars were born, so audiences can witness the brilliant supernova explosions that sent new kinds of atoms coursing through the universe, some of which eventually ended up in our own bodies and the air we breathe. A striking tour of the heavens introduces audiences to the life cycle of stars, from the birth of our Sun in a stellar cluster swaddled in its natal gas and dust clouds to a system with a brown dwarf circling a red star to white dwarfs that have reached the end of their stellar lives.
Journey to the Stars presents astrophysical research into the life cycle of stars—how they first form, develop, and die. Journey to the Stars features dramatic re-creations of celestial events, such as the birth of the first stars from the dark spaces that existed soon after the Big Bang or the final days of our own Sun five billion years from now, as it swells beyond all recognition into a red giant. Perhaps most surprising of all, viewers discover that most of the heavier naturally-occurring elements in the universe—including those found in our own bodies—were forged in the fiery hearts of stars and expelled in supernova explosions. Everything around us, including everyone we’ve ever known, came into existence with the help of this ancient “star stuff.”
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Journey to the Stars was developed by the American Museum of Natural History, New York (amnh.org) in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco; GOTO INC, Tokyo, Japan; Papalote • Museo del Niño, Mexico City, Mexico; and Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
Journey to the Stars was created by the American Museum of Natural History, with the major support and partnership of the Heliophysics Division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.
Journey to the Stars was written by Emmy award winner Louise A. Gikow, with music by renowned award-winning composer Robert Miller.
About the American Museum of Natural History (amnh.org)
The American Museum of Natural History, founded in 1869, is one of the world’s preeminent scientific, educational, and cultural institutions. The Museum encompasses more than 40 permanent exhibition halls, including the Allison and Roberto Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals, which opened in 2021 – those in the Rose Center for Earth and Space and the Hayden Planetarium, as well as galleries for temporary exhibitions. The Museum’s scientists draw on a world-class research collection of more than 34 million artifacts and specimens, some of which are billions of years old, and on one of the largest natural history libraries in the world. Through its Richard Gilder Graduate School, the Museum grants the Ph.D. degree in Comparative Biology and the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree, the only such free-standing, degree-granting programs at any museum in the United States. The Museum’s website, digital videos, and apps for mobile devices bring its collections, exhibitions, and educational programs to millions more around the world. Visit amnh.org for more information.
