Escape The Science Lab

Hang a bar magnet on a piece of thread and wait until it stops moving. One end will eventually point to the north pole of the Earth. This happens because the earth is a giant magnet, and your magnet is lining up with the Earth's magnetic field, which surrounds our planet like a giant bubble and allows us to find our way around. A magnetic field is an invisible force field that surrounds magnets. Other magnets and some metals are influenced if they come into the magnetic field. The magnetic field around a bar magnet is called a butterfly diagram. Perhaps you can see why. The field is why a magnet will stick to a fridge, or two magnets may push each other away. Each magnet’s magnetic field interacts with the other’s, causing attraction or repulsion.  The ends of a magnet are called poles. One end is called the north-seeking pole, and the other is the south-seeking pole. We usually shorten these to north and south. Put two poles that are the same together; they will repel. A north and...

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...