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New Show at the SDC’s Digistar Planetarium

The Nido Fortified Science Discover Center at the Mall of Asia has a new planetarium feature called Dark Star. We watched the premier last Saturday and we learned some cool new things about space.

Before the show started, Dr. Armando Lee, a contributing editor of the Philippine Journal of Astronomy, talked about the different kinds of stars as well as other heavenly bodies. From him, I learned that a star’s life span is six trillion years. Our universe is merely fourteen billion years old and that our sun (which is actually a star, if you haven’t figured that out yet LOL) still has a long way to go.

Massive stars, however, have shorter life spans of about two to five billion years only. “Mass rules,” says Dr. Lee. “The bigger the star, the shorter its life.” He also shared with us that unlike normal perceptions that the color red signifies heat, this is not applicable when it comes to stars. Hot stars are bluish in color. They turn to yellow, then white, and finally, red as it cools.

Hubby and son beside the Dark Star poster

The show Dark Star is the story of a teenage girl named Subrah. She has been her father’s companion for the last three years in a dusty planet where he is studying the imminent end of a dying star nearby. When the star is finally about to explode and go into supernova mode, Subrah’s dad decided it was time to leave. Unexpectedly, father and daughter became separated.

I won’t reveal the rest of the story. Let’s me just say a lot of things happened which Subrah, and her robot Sweeps, must overcome by applying the scientific principles she has learned over the years but didn’t know could help her one day. Find out how she and her dad got reunited and how they were able to find the space portal that would finally lead them home to their own planet Bekenal.

The CGI effects were really great and the sounds, as always, were very clear inside the planetarium. I only wished the characters didn’t look too weird or too alien-like. But, that’s artistic freedom for you. After all, Bekenal must be very different from planet Earth.