Museum Announces New Hayden Planetarium Space Show in June 2025

For the 25th anniversary of the iconic Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space, the American Museum of Natural History will open a new Hayden Planetarium Space Show illuminating the thrilling cosmic movements that shape our galactic neighborhood and our place in the universe. Since 2000, the Hayden Planetarium’s acclaimed Space Shows have transported millions of visitors across our solar system and to the edge of the observable universe with increasingly sophisticated visualizations based on observations from groundbreaking space missions and leading-edge scientific models.

The Hayden Planetarium’s seventh Space Show, Encounters in the Milky Way, opening on June 9, 2025, and narrated by actor Pedro Pascal, is the first 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, which has been dubbed the “billion-star survey” for mapping the precise positions, distances, and motions of nearly 2 billion stars in the Milky Way since 2013.

Using Gaia’s revolutionary new atlas to create cutting-edge timelapse simulations of the movements of celestial objects, Encounters in the Milky Way takes visitors on an exhilarating voyage through our immediate stellar neighborhood and into the broad and bustling Milky Way. 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 a smaller satellite galaxy. For an exhilarating view at the groundbreaking instrument that is peering beyond the Milky Way, the Space Show will feature the James Webb Space Telescope, operating since 2022 a million miles away from Earth.

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

With a newly installed high-resolution immersive audio system and advanced visualizations, the Museum’s iconic Hayden Planetarium will give audiences a front-row seat to spectacular moments in our solar system’s past and future, including:

• The Sagitarrius dwarf galaxy’s approach to the Milky Way, beginning a several-billion-year, ongoing merger that has fueled multiple periods of star formation, including one that may have led to the formation of our Sun 5.7 billion years ago
• About 5 million years ago, our solar system’s entry into a “local bubble,” an area of the Milky Way galaxy cleared of gas and dust by supernova explosions, just as early human ancestors were beginning to walk upright
• In about a million years, the star Gliese 710’s movement through the outer part of our solar system–an area called the Oort cloud—and, in the process, re-routing the paths of nearby comets

Encounters in the Milky Way is curated by Jackie Faherty, senior research scientist 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. Laura Moustakerski, a writer and producer in the Museum’s science visualization group, wrote the script, and the score is by Robert Miller, a New York City composer who scored four of the previous 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. 

To date, the Museum’s Space Shows have been seen by more than 15 million visitors and have been distributed to 160 institutions across 40 countries worldwide.  

Encounters in the Milky Way was developed with the major support and partnership of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 

With deep gratitude to Van Cleef & Arpels 

Generously sponsored by Robert and Kristin Peck