Developed in cooperation with the popular Christa McAuliffe Space Education Center in Pleasant Grove, the iWorlds Space Center at Thanksgiving Point gives you the opportunity to go on a thrill ride through the universe. During the course of your mission you may encounter alien races, race to save entire planets and civilizations from destruction, meet rogue space pirates, fly your starship through asteroid belts, and battle with enemy spaceships. You’ll collaborate with your teammates to solve problems and successfully complete your mission. Bring your friends and family—the iWorlds Space Center experience will take you to places you’ve never been before.

Additional information on the iWorlds experience is available online. Call 801.768.2300 to reserve your place on an upcoming mission or to book one for your own group. Provide your Clark Planetarium membership number upon booking and receive a 10% discount.

Make sure you’ve play the video at HD resolution, full screen size, and with your computer’s speakers turned up.

Close your door and don’t answer the phone.

What you’re seeing is a collage of video clips taken from the BBC series, “Wonders of the Universe,” a program that airs on the Science Channel and is completely worth watching.

The video contains no narration, no charts, no explanations… just a series of CGI animations based on and blended with real astronomical images from the world’s great observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope, presented with an astonishing soundtrack.

Is it a science lesson?  Is it a music video?  Is it a CGI demo?

Who cares?

This is why I love astronomy – it appeals to people on so many different levels and offers connections to so many other disciplines.

What are you looking at? 

Everything.

Stellar nurseries.  Roiling suns.  Star clusters.  Supernovae.  Pulsars.  Black Holes.  Galaxies.

The story of stellar evolution is laid out as a non-verbal, highly emotional thrill ride, illustrated with cutting edge computer graphics and accompanied by a soundtrack that will amaze you.

Watch it.

Only hard-core astronomy lovers need proceed beyond this point.

After you have played the video a couple of times, start thinking about the scales of time and distance involved in these animations. 

What is the time involved for the star formation shown at 1:20?

How long did it take the Earth-swallowing Red Giant star to form at 3:30?

How fast are you moving as you recede from the galaxy at 4:10?

How big is your field of view at 4:45?

How strong is the radiation, and how much gravity are you feeling above the Blue Giant star at 5:17?

How big is the nebula at 8:50?

How big is the pulsar at 9:10, and how massive is it?

How much energy is being released by the Supernova at 11:25, and how far from it are you?  How fast is the Supernova expanding?

How long is it going to take the Black Hole at 14:25 to devour the ill-fated star caught by its gravity?

This is good stuff.  We should celebrate the fact that people in the world are putting the time and talent into projects like this.

The solar system is our star, the Sun, and everything that orbits around it. The Latin name for the Sun is Sol. That is why it is called the solar system. What objects orbit the Sun? At last count, there are 8 planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) and 5 dwarf planets (Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Makemake [pronounced MAH-kay MAH-kay] and Haumea). All of these except Mercury, Venus, Ceres and Makemake have one or more moons orbiting them. There are also innumerable asteroids and comets that orbit the Sun, but no stars.

The solar system is very different from a galaxy. A galaxy is a huge collection of stars bound together by gravity. The Sun is 1 star among 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Are there other “solar” systems (more properly called stellar systems) in the galaxy? Yes. Astronomers have discovered hundreds of other stars that have planets orbiting them. Most of these newly discovered planets are Jupiter-size, as they are the easiest to find. NASA’s Kepler Mission is now searching for Earth-size and smaller planets orbiting other stars. After its mission concludes, we should have a good estimate of about how many of the stars in our galaxy have planets.

The Universe is everything we know of. It contains hundreds of billions of galaxies.

These are such big numbers that it is hard to comprehend them. Here is an example that might help. If you received $1,000 per day, how many days would it take until you had $1 million? The answer is 1,000 days, which is about 2.7 years. Now, for the billion dollar question. If you received $1,000 per day, how many days would it take until you had $1 billion? The answer is 1 million days. How many years is 1 million days? Try to figure it out before reading ahead… is it 5.4 years? 27 years?

The answer is 2,738 years! A billion is a REALLY big number. Remember, the Milky Way has over one hundred billion stars. That’s a hundred times bigger than a billion! If you could catalog 1,000 stars a day for 2,700 years, you would have cataloged less than 1% of the stars in our galaxy. That’s why astronomers should have job security.