On the exoplanet Janssen, heat from its host star and immense pressure have made the world something of a hellscape, with the potential for lava flowing across its surface. But amid the fiery chaos, astronomers think there may be some spots of glimmering beauty: diamonds.
“We know it’s hot enough and dense enough that diamonds could form on the surface,” says Randall Smith, associate director for science at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). And research suggests that solid diamond might even make up the planet’s core.
Informed by this science, people can now see what it might look like to stand on the planet Janssen in a new virtual reality (VR) experience called Smithsonian Starstruck. Wearing a VR headset, participants look around at the lava flows and watch rocks fall on the volatile world. They can even pick up and throw diamonds into the red-hot ooze. (“It’s not a main story point,” concedes Elliott Mizroch, director of Starstruck with the entertainment company Fever, “but a fun, interactive Easter egg for those who discover it.”)
The immersive experience, developed by Fever and Smithsonian Enterprises, provides a 40-minute-long tour of the cosmos—from the surface of the sun to the Atacama Desert to the event horizon of the Milky Way’s black hole, where not even light can escape the immense pull of gravity. It debuts in Washington, D.C., on June 12 and is expected to subsequently open in about 30 other cities across the world.
“Starstruck is like a documentary that you can walk through,” Mizroch says. Viewers listen to narration, watch scenes of cosmic objects that extend in all directions and engage with interactive features. It offers a sense of scale for telescopes, planets, nebulas and galaxies that could otherwise be hard to visualize.
The Hubble Space Telescope is the size of a school bus, while the James Webb Space Telescope has a sunshield that’s roughly the size of a tennis court.
Each cosmic vista shown in VR was directly informed by the scientific work of SAO and the efforts of astronomers worldwide, making the immersive experience a showcase of celestial imagery and scientific discovery.
Consider Betelgeuse, a red supergiant that’s among the brightest stars seen from Earth. The volatile star has shifted dramatically before—suddenly dimming in 2019 and 2020, then varying its brightness at faster than normal intervals. Astronomers suspect Betelgeuse will explode as a supernova, releasing as much energy in a fraction of a second as our sun will emit in its lifetime. In Starstruck, viewers watch that imagined scenario play out.
Because Betelgeuse hasn’t yet blown up, the team turned to SAO’s data on the remains of a different exploded star. The colors and phases of the explosion were “scientifically accurate and modeled after Cassiopeia A,” Mizroch says, describing a supernova remnant in the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia. The aftermath of that explosion was imaged by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the most powerful space telescope for spotting X-rays across the universe, operated by SAO.
In another scene, participants view the surface of our sun, with solar flares looping outward, and the Parker Solar Probe appears to fly past. The spacecraft’s mission—to “touch” our closest star—brings it into a 1,700-degree-Fahrenheit environment, where “essentially almost any kind of human-manufactured instrument is just going to melt,” Smith says. The probe is protected behind a 4.5-inch-thick shield of carbon that keeps its temperature to about 85 degrees. But to make certain observations, some of its technology has to emerge from behind the shield.
One instrument on the solar probe, called SWEAP (Solar Wind Electrons, Alphas and Protons), was developed by SAO to measure the outward flowing stream of particles known as the solar wind. It can clock “how fast they’re going, what kind of particle they are, how energetic they are, so on and so forth,” Smith says. But if it were regular metal, “it will just, again, melt. So actually, parts of it were made out of things like synthetic sapphire,” he says. “That was the only way to actually make it work.” Despite becoming so hot that parts of it glow red as it collects data, the instrument has been making observations for years.
At the climax of Starstruck, viewers are transported to the edge of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It looks like a void encircled by swirling, glowing matter. The scene is built from the stunning “orange donut” images of the black hole, which were captured in a worldwide collaboration that SAO helped lead, Smith says. Founded by Shep Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, the Event Horizon Telescope—a network of radio observatories around the globe working as one—captured these unprecedented views.
The virtual experience conveys what it would be like to stand by a black hole if you could, from objects stretching out as they get pulled inward to how light behaves. “We have a scene where you push light from your hand into the black hole, and it changes colors, and that’s an actual phenomenon that would happen,” Mizroch says.
Scientists’ ability to see into the distant universe is only expected to get better. For instance, the forthcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory, which is still years to decades away from launch, will directly image exoplanets based on the light they reflect from their host stars. These won’t be high-resolution views—“they’ll probably just be dots,” Smith says—but to have any imagery at all of such faraway and backlit targets is “going to be pretty darn amazing.”
As soon as 2029, the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile will become operational. It will be the largest optical telescope in the world, capable of photographing cosmic objects with ten times the clarity of Hubble. This year, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will launch to probe questions surrounding dark energy and exoplanets.
And as these future telescopes aim at the cosmos, they’ll send back even more fantastic data and images that map out the scale of the universe, just as the visuals do in Starstruck. For Mizroch, he hopes people leave the experience with a sense of awe about the world beyond Earth. “I would like people to just be inspired by what’s happening out there.”
Editors’ Note: Smithsonian magazine is part of Smithsonian Enterprises, which developed the Starstruck experience. The writer and editors of this article were not involved in the creation of Starstruck.
Carlyn Kranking is Smithsonian magazine's associate web editor for science.
