This 4k flatscreen documentary was produced with our production partner Tom Lucas for streaming on Amazon Prime. We worked with researchers on the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) to tell the story of how dark matter and dark energy were key ingredients in the beginning of the universe. Visualizations from the film can be seen here.

This show featured a lot of beautiful imagery of astrophysics datasets, many of them of large scale structures of the universe sometimes called the “cosmic web”. Of these adaptive mesh refinement volumetric datasets, one showed evolution of a neighborhood of galaxies affecting each other through time; another showed a static large scale structure at extremely high resolution; and a third showed how early stars exploding mixed elements together to form metal-rich stars that could support planets and eventually life.

Another simulation by Nathan Goldbaum showed the evolution of a Milky Way-like galaxy, with thousands of supernovae sparkling like fireflies.