Astronomers Have Spotted a Record-Breaking Magnetic Field in Space, And It's Epic

A star that roars with a magnetic force that beats anything physicists have ever seen is far out in the Milky Way.

The Swift J0243.6+6124 was discovered around the GRO J 1008-57 and 1A 0535+252 and is believed to be the largest ever found.

The average novelty fridge magnet comes in at less than one hundredth of a watt. The more powerful machines are capable of hitting 3Tesla.

Engineers earned a pat on the back a few years ago when they achieved a 1,200Tesla, sustaining it for 100 microseconds.

It makes sense that 1.6 billion people will demand some truly mind-blowing physics. The kind that can only be achieved by massive objects crammed into impossible volumes and spun at incredible speeds.

Swift was already seen as a star. It's the only X-ray source in the universe that's ultra-luminous.

It's the only example of an X-ray pulsar with a companion star feeding it matter that can produce radio-emitting jets of matter from its poles.

Analyzing the features alone adds up to a unique opportunity in our backyard.

It's difficult to measure the magnetic field of a long way away. As strong as they are, the fields quickly weaken and become invisible over a long period of time.

There are clues that can be found in the way that the bright X-rays scatter from the electrons as they whiz down the magnetic racetrack.

The measurement of electron energies in the GRO J 1008-57 field will be possible thanks to the X-ray observatory Insight-HXMT launched in China.

The launch of Insight-HXMT provided a glimpse into its own high- strength magnetic field with a cyclotron resonance scattering feature buried within its X-ray spectrum.

The feature was analyzed by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Sun Yat-Sen University in China and the University of Tbingen in Germany.

Swift J3.6+6124 is the only X-ray pulsar in our galaxy that has a magnetic field that is precise.

Swift J0243.6+6124 are made of atoms that are far beyond what we can make on Earth. Its magnetic properties help explain how compact it is.

The nature of the star's magnetism supports the idea that its field is complex.

astrophysicists want to understand the mysteries of some of the most exotic objects in space

It's enough for the rest of us to imagine a 1.6 billionTesla magnet stuck to our fridge.

This research was published in a journal.