They’re both metals right?
In: 3
Electrons have a property called “spin” which is basically them being tiny little magnets. In most materials the direction the electrons are pointing is random. In certain “ferromagnetic” materials like iron the electrons at the edge of each atom interact with the electrons at the edge of neighboring atoms in such a way that the lowest energy state (which they want to get into) happens when they all point in the same direction. This results in a net magnetic field in the material.
From that explanation it would seem that iron should always be magnetized, but obviously it sometimes isn’t. In that situation the object is actually divided up into tiny regions where the electrons are all aligned, but the different regions aren’t all aligned. Exposing the iron object to a magnetic field (or allowing them align in other ways) gets all the all the regions pointing in the same direction resulting in a net magnetic field.
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