Can you make a piece of metal orbit a magnet?

Question

If we can make satellites orbit our planet, can you apply the same idea to magnetism and fire a piece of metal at the perfect velocity, in a vaccuum, to make it orbit a magnet?

Answer 1

Yes, but the magnet would not be the typical bar or u shaped kind. Those wouldn't provide the right kind of magnetic fields.

A little background: If you fire an electron transversely into a uniform, single directioned magnetic field, it will orbit inside the magnetic field with a characteristic radius (cyclotron frequency). This occurs because of the Lorentz force law:

F=(v x B)

Because the velocity is perpendicular to the magnetic field it creates a force which will is perpendicular to both and will bend the velocity in the plane perpendiular to the magnetic field. Essentially you just cause the particle to move in a closed loop.

So, what's the lesson here? The piece of metal should respond in the same way that an electron does if the metal is small enough and the magnetic field is large enough. The reason you have these restrictions is because if you have comparable parameters, the metal moving in the magnetic field will create another magnetic field which will affect the source of the original, and you have a kinematic mess on your hands.

In summary, yes it's possible, but you need a source that can create a large unidirectional uniform magnetic field.

Answer 2

I reckon no. Even in microgravity the orbit would be unstable. But possibly you could with two opposite electric charges. I once charged up the aluminium sphere on a Van de Graaf generator and flicked some water droplets nearby. Some of them completed several orbits before falling to the ground. Water is a polar liquid. The sphere attracted the opposite charge on the water drop to the nearest side of the drop, so the drop behaved as if it had a charge opposite to the sphere. Only a force like gravity or electrostatic attraction, which obey an inverse square law give you a stable orbit. Magnetic attraction drops off faster than this with distance. And you've got the opposite pole of the magnet to worry about, which is why magnetic levitation is usually so fiddly to achieve.

Answer 3

You could, but it would be much more difficult. The shape of a gravitational field is very clean. Its inverse square relationship is spherically symmetric. It supports any elliptical orbit, including circular. The magnetic field around a bar magnet is radially symmetric, not spherically symmetric. Your 'orbit' would need to be circular around the axis of the magnetic field. Stray toward the opposite pole of the magnet and you'll be repelled instead of attracted. Stray the other way and the attraction quickly overpowers the angular momentum and you crash into the magnet. A gravitational orbit is stable; a magnetic orbit is not. If God had made slightly different choices about the laws of our physical universe, you'd be surprised at how different the universe would be.

Answer 4

No, because a magnetic field is different than a gravitational field. For once a magnetic field requires a dipole, which mean you absolutely have to have a north and a south pole, there is no single point where a magnetic field can originate from. Also, magnetic field lines go from one pole to the other, not inward toward the magnet.

EDIT: Actually now that I think about it, it might be possible with particle accelerators......but I'm not sure.

Answer 5

Take a block of wood and tie a rope to it. Swing the wood around and around on say 6 ft of rope (watch out you don’t hit anything). There are two forces acting on the wood in a balanced way so that it moves around you in a circle. Inertial forces want to make the wood fly off in a straight line away from you, if the rope breaks, this is the only force left and that is what the wood does - it flies off away from you in a straight line. The other force in centripetal which is like gravity in the earth sun case. The force that the rope applies to the wood is like the gravity that exists between the earth and sun. So the two forces are inertial (wants to pull the wood/earth away from you/sun), and centripetal/gravity (attractive force between the wood/earth and you/sun). They are balanced by the equations governing each in such a way that at a given orbital distance, there is a prescribed orbital period. As you lengthen the rope the orbit slows down. Hope this isn't too long winded. The spin of the earth was set in motion when dust particles collapsed to form a solid planet about 4 billion years ago, and it never stopped since (it has slowed down some since then though)

Answer 6

Absolutely YES!. Get a magnet, a giant billion ton magnet will do just fine... Park it out in space somewhere. We will call this planet magnet. Now get a nice chunk of non-ferrous metal like say brass. A few million tons will suffice. This is our moon. Place it in orbit around planet magnet. It will circle around just fine. Be aware that it is the gravity of planet magnet holding moon brass in orbit. Any magnetic attraction (if moon brass contained some ferrous metal impurities) would tug at the moon and disrupt its orbit.

Answer 7

hypothetically yes. the magnet would act like the earths gravitational pull and pull the peice of metal in, but you would have to do it in space where there is no friction then it would work better becausae you would have to not have the earths pulll affecting it. and it would have to be very precise

You would have to be able to control the magnet perfectally which is beyond our current technology