Cosmic Collisions - opening June 6, 2008 at the Adler Planetarium

Narrated by award-winning actor, director, and producer Robert Redford, Cosmic Collisions launches visitors on an awe-inspiring trip through space and time—well beyond the calm face of the night sky—to explore the hypersonic impacts that drive the continuing evolution of the Universe. This new space show focuses on the full range of collisions, from catastrophic planetary impacts and the merging of massive galaxies to the continual explosions occurring in the center of the Sun and the incessant barrage of small ionized particles in the solar wind ricocheting off Earth’s magnetic field creating other-worldly conditions called “space weather.”

Cosmic Collisions presents a view of the cosmos that is radically different from our everyday experience watching the peaceful night sky. Collisions are commonplace occurrences in space and are currently understood by scientists as a key mechanism in the evolution of the Universe. They are the spectacular and inevitable result of gravity pulling together objects such as planets, stars and galaxies, which are in constant motion through space. For the first time, Cosmic Collisions re-creates tremendous encounters that are usually invisible to us, either because they unfold over incredibly vast expanses of time and space, spanning billions of years and trillions of miles (as in the clash of galaxies), or because they occur almost instantaneously on a subatomic scale (as in the collision of protons in the heart of the Sun).