Where did the building blocks of life come from? The answer lies in the hearts of distant stars and incredibly powerful explosions such as supernovae.
Premiering November 10, 2023, the California Academy of Sciences’ newest original, all-digital planetarium show, Spark: The Universe in Us, takes viewers on a journey across the universe and deep into a dying star with cutting-edge visualizations to show how celestial events forged the elements that make up the Solar System, Earth, and us. Watch the trailer here.
Narrated by actor Diego Luna, Spark is the ninth original in-house production by the Academy’s award-winning Visualization Studio and will be offered in both English and Spanish, with the latter available in winter 2024. Spark marks a number of visualization firsts, including: never-before-seen gravitational lensing around neutron stars; a single sequence showing all the stages of the core-collapse supernova (the progenitor star, the shell burning around the core, then the explosion); and the first visualization of the Milky Way’s evolution in reverse, spanning three billion years and derived from approximately 1.6 Terabytes of simulation data.
Spark: The Universe in Us will play every day in Morrison Planetarium following the premiere on November 10 (see the daily calendar for showtimes). During every Morrison Planetarium show a presenter will share a live update on the latest scientific discoveries and data that inform our knowledge of life in our universe and beyond.