THE field of the most powerful magnet yet found in the Galaxy has been measured. The source is a young neutron star, so dense that the atoms inside it have dissolved into a sea of neutrons.
Alaa Ibrahaim of George Washington University in Washington DC made the first direct measurements of the star’s field, by observing the wavelength of radiation absorbed by protons trapped around the magnetic field lines. He says in a future issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters that the field is around 100 billion teslas. The huge magnets used in CAT scans are around a mere 1.5 teslas.…
