Stars R Us exhibition

Stars R Us was a travelling exhibition, which aimed to engage the public with the impacts of research into astrochemistry, taking place across Europe.

The exhibition consisted of a suite of engaging posters and interactive exhibits, designed to facilitate discussion between members of the public and researchers manning the exhibition. It introduced audiences to the life cycle of a star and how the material that stars are made from can form the building blocks of life. The audience also discovered how to discern the chemical make-up of different astral bodies and recreate the conditions of space in the laboratory.

Stars R Us was a collaboration between researchers at UCL, the University of Nottingham, the Open University, Heriot-Watt University, Strathclyde University and the EU funded network: Laboratory Astrochemical Surface Science in Europe (LASSIE FP7 ITN). It was originally developed in 2003, along with other partners such as the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, Greenwich but was revised by Graphic Science in early 2011.

We took the existing exhibition and designed a new series of posters, along with revised content, branding and associated handouts. We were also responsible for developing some large-scale interactive exhibits, which could be easily and safely transported.

Exhibits included:

Seeing Stars, featuring a plasma globe and stars made of different elements. Audiences can work out what each star is made of by looking at its spectrum through a spectroscope.

Seeing the Invisible, an adjustable monitor which allows the audience to look at an image with visible and infrared light.

Life in a Bottle, a version of the original Urey & Miller experiment, which uses an electrical discharge to simulate lightning.