Presentation Information
[O5-01]Scientific Advancements Made During AMNH's "Encounters in the Milky Way" Production Aided by the NASA funded software OpenSpace
*Jackie Faherty1, Carter Emmart1, Jon Parker1, Micah Acinapura (1. American Museum of Natural History (USA))
Keywords:
Research,Gaia,Space Show
The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) contains the Hayden Planetarium which has produced seven high end space shows since its renovation in 2000. These shows are licensed globally and viewed by millions of people each year in New York City and beyond. In June 2025, AMNH released a show entitled “Encounters in the Milky Way”. This production was conceived and tested using the NASA funded software package entitled “OpenSpace”. Over several years, public planetarium programs to sold out audiences under titles such as “Our Dynamic Universe”, “The Cosmic Ballet”, and “The Milky Way as You’ve Never Seen it Before” used OpenSpace to showcase the scientific revelations of the Gaia space telescope. These included the full Gaia kinematic catalog dynamically moved over time, subsets of newly discovered clusters, potential home systems for interstellar objects Oumuamua and Borisov, the stream members of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy and more. OpenSpace was a critical component to formulating a treatment for “Encounters in the Milky Way” and paved the way to scientific discoveries such as a spiral structure in theoretical data of the solar systems Oort cloud and the dynamic outcome of a simulation for the stellar flyby with the star Gliese 710 set to occur in just over 1 million years. In this IPS presentation we will discuss the scientific insights which emerged during the production of "Encounters" while also highlighting the contributions from the OpenSpace pre-rendered visualizations.