Escape The Science Lab

You may have heard that diamonds are a girl`s best friend or are forever, but have you ever heard of these shiny pieces of bling falling from the sky as rain? Diamonds are also well known for being super hard, so much so that they are attached to the tips of drills to cut through the toughest materials. Where, then, would you find liquid diamonds? That`s right, liquid!  One of my favourite pastimes is to read about and listen to podcasts about the planets. Why is this subject so fascinating to me? Apart from the fantastic photographs that spacecraft have sent back from these objects, some of the ways they work are unlike anything we will ever see on Earth. In the solar system, temperatures and pressures never occur naturally on our planet. This means that substances we are familiar with do strange things elsewhere in the solar system. For example, ice far away from the sun`s influence gets so cold that it behaves like rock. Methane, the gas used for cooking and heating, can be a li...

I remember watching footage from the Voyager space probes when I was a child. These were two spacecraft sent to study the outer solar system. They sent back incredible images of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.    When the Voyager missions were planned, the interest was in the planets of the outer solar system, but when the images came back, the moons caught people’s attention. These turned out to be a fantastic array of hugely different worlds, giving scientists many years' worth of data to study.   The images of the moon's surfaces gave clues about their structure and what they could be made from. Astronomers have spent hundreds of years studying our moon (above), which is covered in mountains, craters and flat plains called 'mare', which show that it has had a violent past. Some of the moons of the outer solar system are like our moon, see Mimas below, but others caused a great deal of excitement. Io (below), for example, had a multicoloured surface of r...