OUR STAR New York City's American Museum of Natural History is showing Journey to the Stars at its Hayden Planetarium. Making the film was international effort, with leading astrophysics groups around the globe contributing the computer simulations derived from observational data.
© AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

As moviegoers make plans to watch summer blockbusters this weekend, there is an additional choice for New Yorkers: Journey to the Stars, the new space show opening July 4 at the Hayden Planetarium in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Rose Center for Earth and Space.

Aside from the three years of planning and 18 months spent making the film, what's special about Journey to the Stars is the international effort that went into producing it, with leading astrophysics groups around the globe contributing the computer simulations derived from observational data. These simulations help scientists gain insight into faraway objects and events—a collision of galaxies, the progression of a supernova explosion, the formation of a planetary system—that they cannot see firsthand.

During its 23-minute running time, the film seeks to capture the entire history of the universe by focusing on stars.

Mordecai-Mark Mac Low and Ben Oppenheimer, resident astrophysicists at AMNH and the co-curators of the show, present a collection of convincing simulations that offer the viewer a state-of-the-art demonstration of astrophysics. "We want people to understand their origins and life-support system," Mac Low says, "and to look at the night sky with a new sense of its depth and variety."

One highlight is a simulation of the interior of the sun, showing its convection and churning magnetic field. The demo came courtesy of Juri Toomre's group at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and required about 14 million hours of supercomputer time spread across four major U.S. supercomputing centers. Hundreds of billions of bytes of data were processed, all of which went into the visualization of the solar interior.