The Museum’s new exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration boldly examines humanity’s next steps in our solar system and beyond. In this video, Museum scientists Neil de Grasse Tyson, Michael Shara, Ben Oppenheimer, and Denton Ebel discuss their work, how their research contributes to the exploration of space, and what inspires them as they think about the future of their field.
The Inside View video series is produced by the Museum’s Department of Exhibition to provide visitors with a close look at the scientific research that takes place in the Museum. Read more »
The Museum’s latest exhibition Beyond Planet Earth: The Future of Space Exploration offers a vision of the future of space travel as it boldly examines humanity’s next steps in our solar system and beyond. The following preview of the Museum’s Beyond Planet Earth Inside View video features Museum scientists Michael Shara, Denton Ebel, Ben Oppenheimer, and Neil de Grasse Tyson as they share why they study space and where they find inspiration for their research.
Produced by the Museum’s Department of Exhibition, the Inside View video series provides visitors with a close and personal look at the scientific work that takes place in the Museum. Read more »
After hovering over Mount Everest and the gorges that plunge to the Ganges, you are pulled through the Earth’s atmosphere to glimpse the inky black of space over Tibet’s high desert. So begins The Known Universe, a new film produced by the American Museum of Natural History that is part of a new exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City.
The magic of this film, though, happens as the inky black expands. Pulling farther and farther from Earth, you see the deep blue of the Pacific give way to night as the Sun comes into focus, the orbits of the solar system shrink smaller and smaller, the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpio stretch and distort, and, as the Milky Way receeds, the spidery structure of millions of other galaxies come into view. Then, you reach the limit of the observable universe, the afterglow of the Big Bang. This light has taken more than 13.7 billion years to reach our planet, and you return, back to Earth, to two lakes that are nestled between Mount Kailash and Mount Gurla Mandhata in the Himalayas.
The structure of The Known Universe is based on precise, scientifically-accurate observations and research. The Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History maintains the Digital Universe Atlas, the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe. The Digital Universe started nearly a decade ago. It is continually updated and is the primary resource for production of the Museum’s Space Shows such as the currentJourney to the Stars, and is used in live, real-time renderings for Virtual Tours of the Universe, a public program held on the first Tuesday of every month. Last year, some 30,000 people downloaded the Digital Universe to their personal computers, and the Digital Universe will soon be updated with a more accurate and user-friendly software interface. Digital Universe is licensed to many other planetariums and theaters world-wide.
“I liken the Digital Universe to the invention of the globe,” says Curator Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astrophysicist at the Museum. “When Mercator invented the globe, everyone wanted one. He had back orders for years. It gave everyone a new perspective on where they live in relation to others, and we hope that the Digital Universe does the same on a grander, cosmic scale.”
The new film was produced by Michael Hoffman, and directed by Carter Emmart. Brian Abbott manages and Ben R. Oppenheimer curates the Digital Universe Atlas. The exhibition at the Rubin, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, opened on December 11 and continues through May 10.
The Big Dipper has just gotten richer by one star. A new image from Ben Oppenheimer’s Project 1640 team shows that Alcor, one of the stars that makes the bend in the ladle’s handle, has a companion. Now named Alcor B, the new star is a faint, smaller red dwarf. It was discovered using Project 1640’s coronograph which blocks out the main star’s light to see faint objects nearby.
But Oppenheimer and his team, including graduate student Neil Zimmerman who was first author of the scientific paper, have done more than find a new star. After re-observing the star some 100 days later, they were able to show that the two stars orbit each other using an innovative technique called “common parallactic motion.”
“We used a brand new technique for determining that an object orbits a nearby star, a technique that’s a nice nod to Galileo,” says Oppenheimer. Galileo tried to use “common parallactic motion” to show that the Earth orbited the Sun, but his equipment was unfortunately not precise enough. The idea is that nearby stars move in an annual, repeatable motion simply because the observer is on Earth and Earth is circling the Sun.
Project 1640 used the idea to show that both stars, Alcor A and B, move together.
Journey to the Stars, the newest space show playing in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, features extraordinary images from telescopes on the ground and in space and stunning, never-before-seen visualizations of physics-based simulations.
Curators Ben Oppenheimer and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low discuss the science behind Journey to the Stars along with collaborator Lika Guhathakurta, a NASA astrophysicist. The team reveals how this immersive theater experience required expertise from scientists around the world and go into some of the research necessary to bring it to the big screen.
