NEW YORK, June 3 (Xinhua) -- The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is launching a new space show to present the story of cosmic motion and how that impacts the solar system, offering a journey through the history and future of the Milky Way galaxy.

Titled "Encounters in the Milky Way," the immersive show will open to the public on June 9. As the 7th space show from the museum's Hayden Planetarium, it has been developed by a team of astronomers, scientific visualization experts, and artists, and designed to explore the dynamic movements of the universe, tracing the Milky Way's past over billions of years and projecting its future across millions more.

The space show is presented in a theater equipped with a high-resolution projection system and immersive sound, giving the audience the sensation of traveling through space and experiencing the galaxy up close.

The show has been particularly supported by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, also called the "billion-star survey," a project aimed at mapping the precise positions, distances, and motions of nearly 2 billion stars in the Milky Way, according to Jackie Faherty, curator of the show.

"Gaia dropped a map that all humans should be proud of," said Faherty at a media preview event on Tuesday. "We mapped the cosmos in a way, and the Milky Way really is the star of it, in a way we had never been able to do before," she added.

The vast amount of detailed star movement data provides an unparalleled visual experience, including some brand-new experiences, such as the first visualization of the dramatic and ongoing merger of the Milky Way with smaller satellite galaxies.

The production team spent approximately one and a half years creating this 25-minute show. Six months were primarily spent searching for data sets, developing outlines and methods, recruiting staff, and developing technical processes, followed by a year or more of production, according to Vivian Trakinski, producer of the show and the director of science visualization of the museum.

"This show has more simulation data than our past shows. We have a new sound system in the dome, which is composed of 34 speakers, which was a great opportunity to specialize the motion that we present in the show. So in that way, it's much richer and more sophisticated. So it's definitely a continuation of our tradition, but there are things that make it unique," Trakinski told Xinhua.

The program is expected to be screened at the museum for about three years.

Faherty expressed the hope that the space show as an introduction to the globe and the map of the cosmos would lead people to explore the data available to everybody, make discoveries and walk away wanting to be scientists.

To date, the museum's space shows have been seen by more than 15 million visitors and have been distributed to 160 institutions across 40 countries worldwide, according to a release by the American Museum of Natural History, which is one of the world's most distinguished scientific and cultural institutions, with a history of more than 120 years.