Amadeo’s Space Visit

Today Amadeo from the observatory came down to St Mary’s to talk about space. I learnt that space is a very dangerous place, and Earth is the only planet we would survive on so we need to keep it clean. Our first experiment was making a comet. We used a big vase and poured water into it. Amadeo had brought along some -78 degrees Celsius, ice. He tipped it into the vase and it made a mini explosion of steam, air, gas or something. The substance reached our toes and we all reached out to touch it. The next experiment was using liquid nitrogen of some kind. Amadeo poured it out onto the mat. It looked like water but as soon as it touched the ground it turned into steamy stuff. The comet kept giving little blows through that experiment so everyone got big frights. The experiment was seeing how easily things would crumple up after being in the liquid. You know how a spoon can bend but cannot break that easily. Well Amadeo put 2 spoons into the bowl of nitrogen and after a while he pulled the spoons out and snapped them easily. His next observation was sucking air from marshmallows to see how big they could get. He had to use a special machine that sucked air from anything. Amadeo produced a glass flask from somewhere and connected it to the machine with a tube. He uncorked the flask and stuffed around 40 marshmallows into the flask. He switched the contraption on. The marsh mallows expanded in the flask. But as soon as the air was let in they shrunk majorly!