Stars are the meat and potatoes of astronomy and cosmology.

Everything we know about the universe depends on a remarkably intimate and hard-won knowledge of how they shine, age and die. They have defined the night for generations, and provided our ancestors with the first hints of a regularity in nature that has haunted scientists and thinkers for thousands of years.

Yet stars rarely occupy the main ring in popular expositions of the cosmos these days. Black holes, the infinitely dense corpses of some stars, drowning all light and matter, are more dramatic. Planets, especially those around distant stars, are more alluring to the imagination. Cosmologists seem to spend more time worrying about the origins of galaxies, the galumphing clouds in which stars live. Now, however, to rebalance the cosmos, so to speak, comes “Journey to the Stars,” a new show in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, it is dedicated to elucidating the nature of those pinpricks in the heavenly vault and what they mean to us.

“Journey” is easily the most beautiful planetarium show I have ever seen and the most vertiginous. The filmmakers have an entire 3-D universe in their supercomputer, and they aren’t afraid to use it to swoop us outward through the stars falling past us faster and faster like snowflakes past the windshield in a storm, flipping us over and diving back and forth through the Milky Way past gnarled ribbons of nebulae.

Half an hour after the show ended, my head was still spinning, and it wasn’t from the Secrets of the Cosmos cosmopolitans with dry-ice cubes the museum was serving to its supporters on the terrace that night.