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Learn about pressure with this egg-celent experiment

This easy science lesson you can do at home helps explain the fundamentals of air pressure.

COLUMBIA, S.C. — If your student is learning about pressure or is looking for a more exciting way to understand science, this experiment is perfect. 

You most likely will have all the materials at home to perform this experiment that helps demonstrate the concept of air pressure.

Here is what you need 

  • A hard boiled egg (with the shell peeled off)
  • A glass container with a tapered top (so the egg can sit on top)
  • A match

The goal of this experiment is to get the egg into the glass container without using your hands.

To do the experiment, you first want to light your match. Students make sure your parents are on hand.

Next, drop the match into the container and quickly place the egg on top.

Credit: WLTX

After a few seconds, you should notice the egg start to wiggle or shake a bit. 

Eventually, the match will go out. 

After that, watch what happens to the egg. 

It should get squeezed and sucked into the container it was sitting on.

Here's what happened. When you light the match and seal off the jar with the egg, the match heats the air in the jar.

When air warms, it expands. Some of the air is able to escape from the jar, which is why your egg might wiggle a little bit. 

Once the flame from the match fades away, the air in the jar all of a sudden cools down.

When air cools, it contracts, becoming smaller and creating an area of low pressure.

The key in this lesson is that air always moves from high to low pressure.

So to equalize the setup, air gets sucked into the jar, along with the egg!

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