Floating Lemons 🍋 and Sinking Limes?! We all know that scientists seem to be mildly infatuated with objects that float and sink. Well, the Three Beans are clearly going to be brilliant scientists one day because they just love chucking stuff in water and seeing what happens! 😂 We had some lemons and limes in the house and, after we did the density experiment with the orange last week and discovered that it floats with the skin on and sinks with the skin off, they saw the lemons and limes and ‘hypothesised’ that they looked similar and so would do the same...so, obviously, we had to try this out! Well, would you believe, that isn’t actually the case at all?! Actually, as it happens, lemons always float and limes always sink. Who knew?🤷🏻♀️ First, we put them in the water with their skins on. The lime, immediately sunk down to the bottom and the lemon bobbed around on the top. We weighed the lemon and lime to show that this is the case, even though our lime was smaller and weighed less than the lemon. We peeled them both. The kids examined the lemon and lime more closely...Since the lemon skin did seem to be thicker and coarser and a little more like the orange skin than the lime, they thought this might work in the same way and trap air to make the lemon float when it was on, but it would still sink when we peeled it? Maybe the skin just wasn’t thick enough on a lime? But, once peeled, the lemon STILL floated and the lime still sank? We also sliced them and, even then, the sliced lemon floated but the sliced lime sank?! Crazy! We tried different lemons and different limes...all of the limes sank. We found one lemon that sort of only half floated once it was peeled...it sat mid-way down in our beaker of water, but, it was still more buoyant than the limes and refused to drop to the bottom completely. Obviously, this experiment shows that an object’s ability to sink or float is all to do with density, rather than weight or size. A lime is denser than a lemon...no matter which way you slice it! 😂 And, it is also denser than water, even with its skin on! #threebeansplaytime #3beansplaytime #floatinglemons #sinkinglimes #densityexperiment #funlearningathome https://www.instagram.com/p/CCCRckUHvGx/?igshid=mpjjgaj1xrhd
