Book a Field Trip
Field trips are available through May 31, 2024. For summer visits, email groupsales@calacademy.org, instead.
Duration: Approximately 35 minutes
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, which help spread fundamental elements to galaxies far and wide where they can spark new life.
Premiering in November 2023, the California Academy of Sciences’ all new, original planetarium film Spark: The Universe in Us explores how hundreds of millions of celestial events have forged the elements that make up the Solar System, Earth, and us.
Travel deep inside a giant star nearing the end of its life, witness the collision of stellar corpses, and experience the quiet demise of a star like the Sun. From the oxygen we breathe to the iron in our blood, the silicon in Earth’s mantle to the uranium that warms our planet’s core and helps give our planet its protective magnetic field, we owe it all to the stars!
Journey across space and time as we explore the remnants of stellar explosions, tracing the movements of elements through our galaxy to understand how stars live, die, and seed the Universe with the elements to build new generations of stars, planets, and life.