Spark: The Universe in Us

Duration: 25 minutes
Grade Level: Film best for grades 5+; content connects to NGSS standards for high school

Narrated by Diego Luna, 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.

Teacher Tip: You can click the Settings cog in the YouTube footer to adjust the Quality to up to 1080HD, and you can also toggle on Full Screen.

While this video doesn't necessarily cover the following standards in depth, it is a compelling resource you can use to supplement your curriculum that does.

Related Performance Expectation
HS-ESS1-3: Communicate scientific ideas about the way stars, over their life cycle, produce elements.

Associated Disciplinary Core Ideas
ESS1.A: The Universe and Its Stars The study of stars’ light spectra and brightness is used to identify compositional elements of stars, their movements, and their distances from Earth. Other than the hydrogen and helium formed at the time of the Big Bang, nuclear fusion within stars produces all atomic nuclei lighter than and including iron, and the process releases electromagnetic energy. Heavier elements are produced when certain massive stars achieve a supernova stage and explode.

Associated Crosscutting Concepts
Energy and Matter: In nuclear processes, atoms are not conserved, but the total number of protons plus neutrons is conserved.