Encounters in the Milky Way, a New Hayden Planetarium Space Show, Opens June 9

Illuminating the thrilling cosmic movements that shape our galactic neighborhood and our place in the universe, the American Museum of Natural History’s new Hayden Planetarium Space Show, Encounters in the Milky Way, will open to the public on June 9, 2025. Narrated by Pedro Pascal, Encounters in the Milky Way debuts during the 25th anniversary of the Museum’s iconic Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, which since 2000 has transported millions of visitors to the edge of the observable universe with increasingly sophisticated visualizations based on observations from groundbreaking space missions and leading-edge scientific models.

Our lives are measured in movement: Earth spins on its axis giving us day and night. Seasons change, and years pass, as we travel around the Sun. While the stars in our night sky appear fixed, the constellations unchanging, they are all in motion. Our own star, the Sun, is part of this galactic migration, and it’s taking us along for the ride. 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. 

Reaching billions of years into the past and peering millions of years into the future, the show’s 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, which launched in 2013 and concluded its mission in March 2025. Gaia has been dubbed the “billion-star survey” for mapping the precise positions, distances, and motions of nearly 2 billion stars in the Milky Way. Using this three-dimensional map, scientists can simulate the dynamics of our entire galaxy and reveal the journey of our own solar system. 

“We’re thrilled to celebrate the Rose Center’s 25th anniversary with the premiere of Encounters in the Milky Way, the latest in a succession of dazzling and eye-opening Hayden Planetarium Space Shows,” said Museum President Sean M. Decatur. “We’re lucky to be living in a golden age of space science and exploration, when new tools and technologies are fueling discoveries and new knowledge about the cosmos. Encounters in the Milky Way combines observations from the Gaia Space Observatory with the latest science visualization capabilities, along with newly upgraded sound technology in our Hayden Planetarium Space Theater, to take visitors on a thrilling journey to experience our galaxy, its history and future, and the dynamic changes continually underway. We can’t wait to share it with our visitors.” 

Encounters in the Milky Way was developed by a team that includes astronomers, educators, science visualization experts, and artists, and was produced with collaborators from more than 20 academic institutions, including the University of Surrey, NASA’s Space Telescope Science Institute, Southwest Research Institute, the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian, Technische Universität Berlin, Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and the European Space Agency. 

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 very clear shape: a structure made of billions of comets with a shape akin to 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 (see release on Oort cloud discovery). 

“It’s a once-in-a-generation time in astrophysics as we are mapping our galactic neighborhood and learning the dynamic history and future of our corner of the Milky Way,” says Jackie Faherty, an associate curator in the Museum’s Astrophysics Department and a senior education manager in the Education Division, who specializes in brown dwarf and exoplanet research and who served as curator on Encounters in the Milky Way. “This Space Show highlights recent discoveries that have revolutionized our understanding of the solar system’s journey through the galaxy.”

The foundation of the show’s spectacular visualizations is Gaia’s revolutionary new atlas, which the team used to create cutting-edge timelapse simulations of the movements of celestial objects. Encounters in the Milky Way takes visitors on an exhilarating voyage into the broad and bustling Milky Way, beginning with the journey of our Sun as it travels around the galaxy at 500,000 miles per hour, making one complete loop every 230 million years. The Sun has made this trip 20 times and counting, meaning it is 20 galactic years old.

In our own solar system, viewers will see simulations of flybys of two interstellar objects: “Oumuamua,” an  approximately 400-meter-long asteroid-like object that was spotted zooming through our solar system in 2017, and an unusually fast comet, Comet 2I/Borisov, that was observed a year later. 

Encounters in the Milky Way also highlights a famous object that is in the process of leaving our solar system: Voyager 2, one of five spacecraft that have been sent out to study the outer planets. Voyager 2 is moving fast enough to escape our solar system but it still has a long way to go because, as we now know, our solar system is more vast than we once thought due to the size of our Oort Cloud, which extends one-and-a-half light years in every direction beyond our Kuiper belt. In the Space Show, viewers will see our Oort cloud as well as the Oort clouds of neighboring stars: The more massive the star, the larger its Oort cloud. In about 1.3 million years, the star system Gliese 710 is set to pass directly through our Oort Cloud, a dramatic scene that is visualized in the show. 

Encounters in the Milky Way also features a colorful visualization of a large structure 1,000 light years across, called the “local bubble.” A clearing within dense clouds of gas and dust, the local bubble was likely formed by shockwaves from a series of supernova explosions starting 10 to 15 million years ago. About 5 million years ago, around the time that early human ancestors were beginning to walk upright, our solar system entered this clearing—providing stargazers on Earth with our magnificent view of the Milky Way ever since. On our journey around the Milky Way, we can expect that our solar system will leave our local bubble and pass through other bubbles again and again as the Sun travels in its galactic orbit. 

An enormous cascade of stars off of our galaxy offers evidence of an ongoing merger between the Milky Way and a smaller galaxy, known as the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, shown for the first time in Encounters in the Milky Way using computer models simulating multiple close passes over billions of years. On its first pass 5 to 6 billion years ago, the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy sent a wave of energy through the larger Milky Way, pushing gas and dust together and triggering an era of star formation—an era that lines up with when our Sun was born.

Finally, the Space Show features an exhilarating close-up view of the groundbreaking observatory that is peering beyond the Milky Way: NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), operating since 2022 a million miles away from Earth. JWST is providing researchers with stunning views of galaxies millions of lightyears away, but with characteristics similar to those of our own Milky Way. 

Along with front-row seats to spectacularly visualized scenes from our universe, the Museum’s iconic Hayden Planetarium Space Theater offers audiences an enhanced experience with an upgraded high-resolution immersive audio system. English subtitles, transcripts, and assistive listening devices are available for Encounters in the Milky Way. A few weeks after the show premieres, English-language Audio Description will also be available, along with audio translations and translated subtitles in the following languages: French, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. For more details, see the Accessibility at the Museum webpage.

Federal funding for the development of Encounters in the Milky Way was secured by Congressman Jerrold Nadler (NY-12), who represents the district in which the Museum is located, and is being administered by NASA.

“The American Museum of Natural History has long been a cornerstone of science and learning in New York City. I’m proud to have helped secure federal funding, administered by NASA, for Encounters in the Milky Way, a new Space Show that will give New Yorkers and visitors alike an extraordinary look at our galaxy and the forces that shape it. It’s a fitting way to mark the 25th anniversary of the Rose Center for Earth and Space, which continues to inspire awe and curiosity in millions of people each year,” Nadler said. 

NASA also funds OpenSpace, an open-source software platform that was used as a tool for initial scene blocking in the production of Encounters in the Milky Way and has been used in the Museum’s Hayden Planetarium programming as well as by astrophysics researchers and students since 2015. 

Encounters in the Milky Way is curated by Jackie Faherty, an associate curator in the Museum’s Astrophysics Department and a senior education manager in the Education Division, and directed by Carter Emmart, the Museum’s director of astrovisualization and one of the original team members of the NASA-funded Digital Universe and OpenSpace projects, which are continuing to redefine how planetarium theaters present science to the public through immersive data visualization. Rosamond Kinzler, senior director of science education and principal investigator on the OpenSpace project, is the executive producer, and Vivian Trakinski, who directs the Museum’s science visualization program, is the producer. Jon Parker is the technical director, and Laura Moustakerski, a writer and producer in the Museum’s science visualization group, wrote the script. Narration direction was by filmmaker Shawn Levy, a Museum Trustee. The score is by Robert Miller, a New York City composer who scored four of the previous Hayden Planetarium Space Shows. 

Previous Space Shows have included Passport to the Universe (2000), narrated by Tom Hanks; The Search for Life: Are We Alone? (2002), narrated by Harrison Ford; Cosmic Collisions (2006), narrated by Robert Redford; Journey to the Stars (2009), narrated by Whoopi Goldberg; Dark Universe (2013), narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium; and Worlds Beyond Earth (2020), narrated by Lupita Nyong’o.