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I’m not kidding when I say that magnetars have the strongest magnetic fields in the Universe. To illustrate, let’s start with something you’re familiar with, the Earth’s magnetic field, and work up from there.
Measured at the North Pole, the Earth has a magnetic field strength of around half a Gauss. At its strongest, our planet can roughly double that number. That's pretty impressive—it's the most powerful magnetic field among the rocky planets of the Solar System—and enough to nudge a compass needle around for handy navigation.
The kind of magnet you stick on your fridge is about 100—200 times stronger than that and can easily counteract the gravitational might of the entire planet.
Moving off the Earth, sunspots reach magnetic field strengths of around 4,000 Gauss, the strongest in the Solar System.
Humans are capable of making some seriously powerful magnets. The most powerful sustained electromagnets reach a few tens of thousands of Gauss. If you've ever had an MRI, you have personally experienced around 10,000 Gauss with no ill effects (if you remembered to take off your jewelry). It's difficult for us to make stronger sustained magnetic fields because they tend to destroy the devices we use to make them. That said, inside of focused explosions, we can make magnetic fields that reach 10 million Gauss for a few microseconds.
A typical magnetar has a surface magnetic field strength of 10-to-the-14th power to 10-to-the-15th power Gauss, with interior strengths 10 times stronger.
That is not a typo. Magnetars have magnetic fields about a quadrillion times stronger than the Earth's and a billion times stronger than the best that humanity can achieve.
If you get within approximately 1,000 kilometers of a magnetar, you die. Instantly. Leaving aside the copious amount of X-ray radiation constantly pouring out of these objects (we'll get to that), the magnetic fields make life literally impossible. The problem is that atoms are made of positively charged protons and negatively charged electrons. In weak magnetic fields, this doesn't make a bit of difference. But in strong fields, the electrons and protons respond differently. Atoms lose their traditional shape, and the electron orbitals become elongated along the direction of the magnetic field lines.
If you somehow made it to the surface of a magnetar, your individual atoms would only be 1 percent as wide as they are long. With atoms turning into needles, atomic physics as we know it breaks down. As does all the bonds that atoms use to glue themselves together into complex molecules.
In other words, the static magnetic field of a magnetar is strong enough to simply... dissociate you. All the molecules that you're made of simply come apart into oddly shaped atoms.
These insanely strong magnetic fields also affect the vacuum of space-time and the quantum foam, the seething froth of particles that constantly appear and disappear at subatomic scales. Many of those particles are electrically charged, and at these field strengths, the particles gyrate around the magnetic field lines at nearly the speed of light. This produces something called a birefringence in the vacuum itself. Like ordinary cellophane, the birefringence can split light into separate directions, leading to weird optical illusions, distortions, and magnification—all from the simple presence of the magnetic field.
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