Jessica Moon

Learning Team Leader

I manage the Learning Team and our learning program, as well as presenting shows and workshops to our visitors.

When did you start at Centre of the Cell?

July 2021, just before my birthday!

What is your favourite science fact?

It rains diamonds on Jupiter! Probably…

There’s a lot of carbon in the clouds of Jupiter. During lightning storms, this carbon is converted into small pieces of soot that fall down towards the centre of the planet like rain. Because Jupiter’s so big, the closer you get to its centre, the more pressure there is all around you. When carbon is put under a lot of pressure, it gets converted into diamond. That means that as the carbon soot is falling, it’s getting squeezed and crushed by Jupiter’s pressure, and so it changes into tiny diamonds as it falls…

Probably, anyway! We’ve never actually seen it happen. That pressure’s far too high for any of our spaceships to survive getting in close enough to look. Scientists don’t have all the answers yet, and this shows that there’s still loads more out there to discover!

What is a fun fact about yourself?

I was on the committee for Murder Soc at my university. We were a murder mystery society, but that name definitely got us a lot of strange looks.

Which part of Centre of the Cell excites you the most?

I love being able to connect the science that we’re talking about to the work going on in the labs right below us! It’s always great getting people excited about science in general, but when you can show them real life examples of science investigations going on right now as they’re coming in and out of the pods, they get to make that instant connection to the real world, and that’s brilliant!

Jessica has previously worked at Winchester Science Centre and at the Royal Society of Chemistry.