Black Holes. Will you get sucked in?

There may be some things in your life that you expect to get sucked in to; helping your friends move, a chain of cat videos on the internet, or maybe even the latest celebrity gossip headline, but what about a black hole? You may think that an object

Everyone’s favourite place for spacey goodness, the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, is kicking off a new planetarium show that lets audiences experience the pull of a black hole. And it’s powerful.

Photo courtesy of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

The journey begins in the Milky Way galaxy, and travels to supernova explosions, galaxies colliding into each other and discusses exactly how scientists might find these cosmic monsters in the dark. Oh, and then you get pulled into the massive blackhole at the centre of our galaxy. (And yes, for all you sci-fi fans out there, they look at the likelihood of teleporting and time traveling through a black hole.)

Galaxies colliding! Photo courtesy Thomas Lucas Productions Inc., Denver Museum of Nature & Science

One of the standout elements of this show is that the feel is a great change from the black holes imagined in Hollywood. The show’s creator actually made his own software called the Black Hold Flight Simulator to convert scientific data into the visuals seen in the show. Those were then translated for the Space Centre’s new planetarium theatre, so you know it’s going to be a great visual experience.

Inside the theatre. Photo courtesy of the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre