As we continue celebrating spooky season this month, perhaps you like to get a good scare by watching a horror movie set in space. There’s the classics such as Aliens or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but we don’t need fictionalized versions of space to find it scary.
In fact, the longer and harder you think about space — the scarier it can get. UWM’s Manfred Olson Planetarium is inviting the public on a spooktacular adventure through the darkest parts of space and chilling stargazing tales in its “Creepy Cosmos” program during the month of October.
Jack Koshkin, one of the student presenters, says they are using the planetarium "as a haunted manor with portals in the rooms to different creepy celestial objects."
"One particular challenge for us was to spook people without actually frightening them," he adds. "The universe has many legitimately scary things about it."
Jean Creighton, the director of the planetarium and Lake Effect’s regular astronomy contributor, notes that once the focus was shifted away from the immediate dangers astronauts face, topics like the sun, the planet Venus, black holes and comets were chosen to be featured.
"People, I think get bored of [the sun]. It's just this yellow little thing in the sky. It makes light, but they don't think about it," she says. However, the sun is capable of producing solar flares with enough energy to power the U.S. for 200,000 years, "which requires you to be aware of when that's happening so you can put some of your satellites on safe mode. You can make sure that your power grids are ready because you don't want things to fry."
The eery sounds of space are also explored through what satellites captured going by Jupiter and a comet.
And, of course, the concept of aliens is included. "The fact is that we are now poised with the James Webb Space Telescope and all the other instruments that we have, we are closer and closer to getting answers to this," says Creighton. "And if I had to guess if we find extraterrestrial life, it won't look anything like what Hollywood has for us."
That may seem alarming, but Creighton continues, "the nice thing about finding life 100 light years away is that we're not going to interact in any kind of direct way. So, they can be there, we can be here. Our job is to take care of our planet and wave at them from a distance."
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