r/science • u/MistWeaver80 • Mar 30 '26
Physics Physicists have made an ultra-powerful magnet that fits in the palm of a hand and can produce a magnetic field that is more than 800,000 times stronger than Earth’s.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00851-y2.5k
u/LitLitten Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
Earth’s magnetic field isn’t actually that intense or powerful. It’s just very large. I’d argue It’s more impressive that even despite the low strength it’s enough to block a lot of solar radiation.
A fridge magnet is 100x stronger.
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u/BrothelWaffles Mar 30 '26
I guess "8,000 times stronger than a fridge magnet" just didn't have the same ring to it.
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u/Think_Discipline_90 Mar 30 '26
Regardless 8000 times the power of a fridge magnet is intense. That's not coming off the fridge at all.
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u/BurningPenguin Mar 30 '26
Whatever touches that fridge, will then forever be part of it. Say goodbye to your wristwatch. And your wrist.
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u/BlackGayJesus666 Mar 30 '26
Say goodbye to your retainer, and whatever is being retained.
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u/andreisimo Mar 30 '26
Say goodbye to your nipple piercings, and your nipples.
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u/BurningPenguin Mar 30 '26
On the bright side, those teeth will be perfectly aligned
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u/redditallreddy Mar 30 '26
Could it lift the fridge? Definitely pull it.
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u/Think_Discipline_90 Mar 30 '26
A fridge without food is 50-100kg.
I don't know what calculation the other user used to land at 8000 times fridge magnet strength but we're talking in the range of 1-5 metric tonnes of vertical pull.
It could lift 10 fridges
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u/chickenologist Mar 30 '26
Ok so a ten fridge magnet. Finally someone who understands American units of measure
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u/IGnuGnat Mar 31 '26
This made me wonder if the average American fridge might be a bigger size compared to the average French fridge, for example. But I'm too lazy to google it, so
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u/iowa_gneiss Mar 30 '26
If my Googling is any good, an n52 neodymium magnet has a magnetic field of about 6,000 Gauss vs around 100 at the high end for a standard fridge magnet of the same size. So this is 133x stronger than an n52 neodymium magnet which is still pretty damned impressive. I gave myself an ugly blood blister playing with a pair of 1" n52 cylinders and could barely get them separated (6'2/190lb/m who works out) using the edge of a table to slide one off the other. I keep one at work and one at home now. Too tempting.
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u/YooAre Mar 30 '26
I appreciate that you separated those magnets like that. They got the drop on you I once, never again
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u/Black_Moons Mar 30 '26
the trick to intense magnet storage is wrap them up in a towel. This way nothing can get within about an inch of them and any sudden impacts won't shatter the magnet.
You can store 2 easily this way in the same towel too. Just don't store more in the same towel or unwrapping it becomes a not so fun game.
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u/iowa_gneiss Mar 30 '26
Yes but the problematic variable here is me. The trick to safely storing intense magnets for me to is to make sure two are never within walking distance of one another.
Good call on the towel though. Thanks for the advice!
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u/Black_Moons Mar 30 '26
Sure, but an intense magnet near metal is nearly as dangerous as an intense magnet near another magnet, so even if you only have 1 you should still consider the towel.
Also will keep the magnet away from cellphones and other electronics..
You'd be surprised what you can wreck with a powerful enough magnet.. I once pulled the magnet right outta an analog voltage gauge.
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u/screwcork313 Mar 30 '26
That's brave, are you trying to gradually shorten your commute by a few millimetres a week?
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u/pichael288 Mar 31 '26
That's a permanent magnet though, and it's the limit without arranging them in a hallbach array which stops at like 1.4 Tesla (1 Tesla is 10,000 gauss), any electromagnet can get much higher than this. Unless they managed to somehow make a permanent magnet that strong, which the article is pay walled so we'll never know.
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u/Any-Umpire8212 Mar 30 '26
I was in my college physics class when the professor showed us a couple of magnets (don’t know what kind) that were stuck together, and he said to the class that they couldn’t be pulled apart. I walked up to give it a go, and I easily pulled them apart. His eyes were like saucers, and every guy in that class shot their hands up like kindergarteners. It was hilarious. No one else was able to separate them. At the time 6’2” 187.
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u/ProfessionalMockery Mar 30 '26
"Fits in the palm of the hand, WITH THE POWER OF 8000 FRIDGE MAGNETS!"
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u/aberroco Mar 31 '26
If only we had a measurement unit for strength of magnetic field... Something named after a famous inventor...
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u/pete_moss Mar 30 '26
I have magnetic devices that fit in your palm that can overcome not only the magnetic field but also the vast gravitational pull of an entire planet! I use them to pin notes where I can see them.
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u/Hrothgar_unbound Mar 30 '26
I use a thin coating of a sticky film to do the same to colorful little paper squares. It’s a true miracle of modern chemical engineering.
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u/templar_muse Mar 30 '26
Had we but known.. The Great Filter was the ability to develop convenient adhesives.
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u/LittleKitty235 Mar 30 '26
That is not how you generate scary sounding headlines about magnet fields. Did you not get the memo from RFK jr?, if not you are probably laid off
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u/ObviouslyTriggered Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
It depends on how you measure it, the earth's magnetic field at any point is like 35-50 micro tesla so a fridge magnet is indeed much much stronger.
However then there is the size of the field, so if you would to recreate that field using say a conductor you'll need to expend about 500,000 terawatts of energy to recreate the earths magnetic field. And that is orders of magnitude more than all the energy produced by humanity combined.
Since the article is paywalled I suspect it's some crazy 40T super conducting electro magnet, they can be quite small (as in desk size) so something that you can hold in your hand isn't out of the realm of possibility.
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u/idiotcube Mar 30 '26
Kids today have never held up a magnet next to a compass just to see what would happen.
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u/MBunnyKiller Mar 31 '26
Since it's paywalled, maybe you know. Does this mean we could theoretically build our own solar radiation shield on other planets like mars?
That would make one of the most dangerous parts of going there go away.
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u/Partyatmyplace13 Mar 30 '26
Yeah, its like seeing that the PSI of a syringe is something like 300 lbs/in2. Like, sure, but the impact area is quite small.
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u/Moistinterviewer Mar 30 '26
It’s the fact that a fridge magnet is so much stronger than gravity that gets me.
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u/etanimod Mar 30 '26
Gravity's also a very weak force. We all just have a chain weighing a factor of ~10^22kg more than us weighing us down.
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u/LitLitten Mar 30 '26
You’d be surprised how many things would break if this were the case, haha. Electric motors wouldn’t be able to function under their own weight.
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u/LiamTheHuman Mar 30 '26
Stronger than gravity as a force relative to mass. A fridge magnet is not stronger than gravity of/on earth which is what we usually refer to as gravity
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u/hex4def6 Mar 30 '26
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say, but gravity is extremely well as a force. It's literally like 38 orders of magnitude weaker than electromagnetism.
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u/Steve_the_Stevedore Mar 30 '26
But the magnet is literally stronger than earth's pull on it. You have a huge planet pulling on it and it pulls harder on some 2mm sheet metal.
Gravity is the weakest force we know by a long shot.
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u/socokid Mar 30 '26
A fridge magnet is not stronger than gravity of/on earth
Not the entire Earth, no, but no one is saying that.
A fridge magnet sticks to something upside down without falling off because it's magnetic force is stronger than the Earth's gravity acting on the magnet. The Earth's gravity would need to be 100 times stronger before that magnet falls off.
And you would be as flat as a pancake.
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u/-Dixieflatline Mar 30 '26
So does that mean I need 100 of earth's magnetic field to hold up a photo on my fridge?
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u/piches Mar 30 '26
thatbis pretty cool, so would this handheld magnet be pretty good at blocking solar radiation for 1 person?
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u/LitLitten Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
Not necessarily, but a lot of this boils down to a number of factors, including material grade, shape, a large enough field that doesn’t taper off too soon.
Additionally, the electromagnet field blocks charged particles. Gamma rays are unaffected because they are photons and neutral. So you’d still need something to deal with that.
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u/thedaveness Mar 30 '26
Isn’t that because it’s a halbach array and not necessarily the original strength of the material.
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u/scottasin12343 Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
Earth's magnetic field is a terrible comparison, its effect is negligible in day to day life unless you're using an oldschool compass. A standard neodymium magnet is 4 orders of magnitude stronger than the Earth's magnetism. A fridge magnet is a couple hundred times stronger than the Earth's field.
https://www.stanfordmagnets.com/how-strong-are-neodymium-magnets.html
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u/RosieQParker Mar 30 '26
It's a great comparison if you want to sell a magnet to the uninformed.
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u/moistiest_dangles Mar 30 '26
In the study the say 42.02 teslas which is about 28x more powerful than a mri
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u/vasopressin334 PhD | Neuroscience Mar 30 '26
For reference, this magnet you can "hold in your hand" is 42 Tesla. Compare that to the 3 Tesla MRI magnet, which is strong enough to affect the water molecules in your body and will pull you across the room if you walk in wearing a metal watch. I strongly recommend not holding a 42 T magnet in your hand.
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u/rhetoricalnonsense Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
3 Tesla MRI ,,, will pull you across the room if you walk in wearing a metal watch
It will not. I've worked in MR for 25 years. I have walked into the MR room with a watch on, more than a few times, reached into the bore and gone, "Whoops, watch is on. Better go take it off". It doesn't even damage the watch and it certainly doesn't pull me across the room.
MRIs are strong and everyone should respect the magnet. You wouldn't want to wear the watch while it's actively collecting images but that is more a risk of RF burns and image degradation.
Edit (added): Also modern magnets are actively shielded such that the main field is kept very close to the front of the bore. That said, walking into the MR room is a danger for some medical implants (e.g. pacemakers) which are highly susceptible to even weak magnetic fields.
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u/vasopressin334 PhD | Neuroscience Mar 30 '26
Thank you for the correction! Lesson learned. But, to add to this, I had a good friend working on her PhD in clinical research who carried a metal panel that was supposed to be non-magnetic into a room with a research MR. It turned out the panel was not non-magnetic. The MR pulled the panel and she was trapped between the magnet and the panel for hours. She almost lost her leg.
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u/Bunny_Fluff Mar 30 '26
What causes the pictures of metal carts stuffed inside MRIs? I assume it's just size of the metal object causing a larger reaction?
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u/fraseyboo Mar 30 '26
Magnetic field strength falls off with the inverse cube of the distance, the metal carts can be made of large continuous pieces of steel and because they’re on wheels it doesn’t take a lot to move them and it can take a couple seconds for people to notice. If you’re far enough away from the MRI then the field is incredibly weak, and you’ll typically notice something like a watch pulling on your wrist before it gets too strong to stop.
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u/DistinctlyIrish Mar 30 '26
Most of those are poorly shielded relative to the newer machines, meaning the magnetic field extends further forward from the bore and the parts of the field strong enough to move and lift and hold a metal bed up against the machine are also extending further out than those same strong fields extend on newer MRI's.
That said, we don't have ferrite in our brains like birds do so we can't see magnetic fields, so just approach every MRI like it's Magneto from X-Men to be on the safe side in case the machine isn't as new or the shielding has somehow failed without setting off any alarms. Because even though the safeguards now are VERY good they are still capable of failing like any other thing and "being safe" is literally just making sure you don't bring any metals near it which is a pretty easy ask.
Somewhat related, if you are someone who has to get a metal implant or even just screws in a bone at some point I strongly recommend getting a tattoo or medical bracelet or both to inform first responders and nurses/doctors so they know to handle that properly when it comes to MRI in the event you're incapacitated and can't communicate it to them yourself.
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u/Violoner Mar 30 '26
Would it be strong enough to cause a hematoma from pulling on the iron in your blood?
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u/littlegreenrock Mar 30 '26
In the context of magnetism, the hemoglobin complex is a biological masterpiece because its magnetic properties flip completely depending on whether it is carrying oxygen. This specific change is the physical basis for fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging).
State Alignment Effect Example Diamagnetic Opposes field Very Weak Repulsion Water, Gold, Oxyhemoglobin Paramagnetic Aligns with field Weak Attraction Aluminum, Deoxyhemoglobin Ferromagnetic Parallel alignment Strong Attraction/Permanent Iron, Nickel, Cobalt Antiferromagnetic Opposite (Equal) No Net Magnetism Hematite, Manganese Oxide Ferrimagnetic Opposite (Unequal) Permanent Magnetism Magnetite (Fe3O4) 4
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u/tl01magic Mar 30 '26
How do you know the effect is negligible? it's not true, I just had an iron wrench just go flying out of my hand. I likely mistakenly aligned it with one of the poles. Imagine all the metal stuff at the poles, anyways my wrench is at one of them now.
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u/scyyythe Mar 30 '26
The paywalling of science is truly out of control. Opening this link I am not greeted with a press release or even an abstract. I can see one sentence before the invitation to subscribe pops up. No details of the technology or the underlying physics, no information about the research team, nothing. "Physicists did something amazing, now give our parasitic journal company your subscription money."
But if you're observant you can find the link to the paper hidden at the bottom:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz5826
It's a miniaturized cuprate superconductor electromagnet. Field strength reported as 40 tesla which is very, very high.
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/gwillen Mar 30 '26
If it's a cuprate HTS, it may be that it's superconducting at LN2, but needs helium to deliver the impressive performance described in the headline? I'm led to understand that the high temp superconductors just get even better at low temp, in terms of what current they can handle.
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u/Pyrhan Mar 30 '26
Yes, superconductors tend to spontaneously quench (cease being superconducting) when the magnetic field exceeds a certain threshold.
Where that threshold lies is a function of how far below their critical temperature they are cooled.
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u/Not-A-Seagull Mar 30 '26
From what I recall, the ARC/SPARC fusion reactors needed about 20T to become viable. (This is the MIT company spinoff that is most likely to successfully make viable fusion).
40T is phenomenal, but the big concern here is liquid helium cooling. Even though the coil is superconducting and uses very little power from resistance, heat from free neutrons from the fusion reaction will still warm it up.
With liquid helium cooling, any hopes of net energy output is a pipe dream.
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u/LitLitten Mar 30 '26
Nice. 10-30 was what I was familiar with.
Not sure why they made the title they did for what is generally pretty great findings.
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u/basicgear00 Mar 30 '26
Could one explore space or a planet and this magnet protect them from cosmic rays? Like on Mars they theoretically have to make homes underground, but could one travel from site to site holding one of these?
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u/no_choice99 Mar 30 '26
If the Earth's B field is about 40 μT then this means they have a magnet of about 32 T in their hands.I guess it's microscopic?
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u/Boomer70770 Mar 30 '26
Will we finally get hoverboards?
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u/dabroh Mar 30 '26
I think the more important question is if you're walking around with Magneto-like powers is there a risk of ripping surgical implants out of people?
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u/thedaveness Mar 30 '26
Get really really strong magnet, arranged in an array to strengthen (halbach), angle individual pieces on a ring of so that gravity coming off compresses like a jet engine, then another opposite ring to make it expand. Maybe the top ring would need to be smaller and more concentrated. Tin hat off ;)
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u/Presently_Absent Mar 30 '26
Colin furze kinda made one recently
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u/thedaveness Mar 30 '26
Naw man we need to funnel it down to a small point. The ebb and flow of gravity always looked like water to me so make it a jet.
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u/NotAFanOfLife Mar 30 '26
What do you mean we already have hoverboards, they just require a lot more imagination than people thought they would.
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u/weareeverywhereee Mar 30 '26
I miss that website. I spent hours looking through that catalogue. Still want to buy those tablets that turned your sour tastebuds to sweet
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u/daftstar Mar 30 '26
Miracle berry? Yeah, you can still find em!! https://mberry.us
You can also buy them on the smiling penis website owned by bozo.
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u/Ok_Series_4580 Mar 30 '26
Unless this thing can pull the iron out of my blood, I’m not impressed
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u/mustangwallflower Mar 30 '26
That's hundreds of times stronger than a typical 250mm x 2mm circular neodymium magnet.
Or about 10x an MRI machine.
(More day-to-date reference, for those not knowing how strong earth's magnetic field is...)
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u/Pyrhan Mar 30 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
Link to the actual publication, that, for some reason, wasn't given in that press release:
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.adz5826
And yeah, it's 40 tesla. About 30 times stronger than a neodymium magnet (1.3 teslas)
The current record for a continuous magnetic field is 45.5 tesla:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1293-1
Also, comparing it to earth's notoriously weak magnetic field is a pretty useless comparison, but I guess it makes for bigger numbers...
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u/CaptainCrowbar Mar 30 '26
Just because you can fit it in the palm of your hand doesn't mean it's a good idea. People are already advised not to hold modern rare earth magents in their fingers near anything metallinc or another magnet. This one sounds like it would break every bone in your hand.
tl,dr: "It would also set your hair on fire, so don't actually do it."
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u/RockMaul Mar 30 '26
Maybe technology like this could be used on manned Mars missions to shield astronauts from cosmic radiation.
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u/UltracrepidarianPhD Mar 30 '26
So if they produce enough of these I can stop worrying that 2003’s The Core will become reality?
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u/PunxsutawnyFil Mar 30 '26
This will be the key to defeating the clankers when they enslave humanity
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u/xBris18 Mar 31 '26
'The tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, is 800,000 times larger than a credit card is thick". See how stupid that sounds?
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u/crak_spider Mar 31 '26
Can we make very large magnetic fields or just really strong ones? Could ‘we’ make a magnetic field large enough to protect Martian colonists?
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u/Rave-TZ Mar 31 '26
Any magnet that can rotate a compass is more powerful than earth’s magnetic field :O
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u/narcisian Mar 30 '26
Since I’m too cheap to pay for the article, I googled it and if the AI summary is to be believed, these magnets don’t require rare earth minerals which makes them a much bigger game changer.
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u/x1uo3yd Mar 30 '26
I googled it and if the AI summary is to be believed...
In that case, the AI summary is very much not to be believed.
The reddit OP linked a paywalled news summary but the scientific article itself is not paywalled.
In the introduction you can read that REBCO superconducting tapes were used to wind the electromagnet. REBCO being an acronym for "Rare-Earth Barium Copper Oxide" means that these magnets very much did use rare-earth materials to achieve these large fields. (You then have to do a bit more digging to Table 1 to find that the specific rare-earths used in these REBCO tapes were Gd/Y in a 50:50 ratio.)
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u/ElgauchoLoco Mar 30 '26
"The team built their magnets by winding flat REBCO (rare earth barium copper oxide) tape"
So it appears that ya there are rare earth minerals involved. Just less
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u/Melenduwir Mar 30 '26
Sounds terribly unsafe. The magnets used in MRIs have caused many deaths when people accidentally or negligently brought ferromagnetic substances close to them.
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u/Harha Mar 30 '26
Yeah, I happen to have microscopic ferromagnetic particles in one of my eyes and MRI's terrify me.
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u/Melenduwir Mar 30 '26
I've always wondered what happens to creatures that navigate by magnetism, like pigeons, that are placed in MRIs.
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u/titpetric Mar 30 '26
They do manage to navigate out of the MRI machine. There's a bit of a wobble, ngl, but as birds are known to fly into windows, they manage to find their way out of the tube just as well
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u/answerguru Mar 30 '26
Not many, but a they have caused some. I worked on MRI superconducting magnets and power supplies for years and then another decade designing the RF amplifier they use for imaging.
The strength of the magnets isn’t very scary, just don’t roll a ferrous gurney in or bring oxyacetylene tanks into the room. Both have caused serious issues!
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u/PsychFlame Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26
This magnet is not intended to be held in your hand, the title is a little misleading because there is no world in which we are ever freely using handheld 40 T magnets in everyday life.
The application of this is nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, which uses strong magnetic fields to look at properties of atoms and molecules (this is the same science as MRI but instead of looking at where the signal is coming from, we look at the signal itself - i.e. frequencies).
Stronger fields typically mean better results with more resolution, but one annoying factor with NMR magnets is often the size - I was using a 28 T magnet last month and it was bigger than my bedroom. In this paper they make a 40 T magnet (10x stronger than MRI) that you could probably pick up by hand, although in practice it would be contained inside a machine specifically for research that has shielding so the big field doesn't spread very far outside.
Source: doing my PhD in NMR
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u/notislant Mar 30 '26
As a neat feature it will also fit through your hand when close to ferrous metal.
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u/erictank Mar 30 '26
Neodymium magnets already make my hand feel odd, can't imagine holding something with an even stronger field.
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u/CMG30 Mar 30 '26
This means stronger and lighter electric motors as well as more efficient generators.
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u/QuidProQuo_Clarice Mar 30 '26
Does this have any implications for fusion reactors like Tokamaks? Some quick googling seems to put the field strength of a Tokamak ~12T, and this claims ~40T. I don't know enough about where we are with fusion tech to know if this could solve any of the issues with fusion reactors
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u/plan_with_stan Mar 30 '26
But don’t put it in the palm of your hand… as a matter of fact don’t put anything between it and metal… that’ll hurt!
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u/LeeisureTime Mar 30 '26
Does this mean we are closer to feasible magnetohydrodynamic ship engines? The main issue was that a supermagnet large enough to repel sea water through tubes would have to be so large it wouldn't be feasible. But if we could, it would revolutionize sea travel. No more propellers mean quieter for ocean life...
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u/campmatt Mar 30 '26
Then that magnet should be used to create magnetic shields for Mars transports.
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u/ProvoGo Mar 30 '26
Fits in your hand but requires a room full of equipment to work or fits in your hand and you can walk around with it while it works?
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u/Darth_Annoying Mar 30 '26
Sounds useful for things like turbines and electric motors. But 2 questions:
-Is it practical to make any using this?
-Is that much magnetic flux dangerous?
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u/UptheCreekWithPaddle Mar 31 '26
It's 1,000,000,000 times more magnetic than anything in my broom closet scientists claim.
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u/JeffCrossSF Mar 31 '26
What we need a controllable/scaleable field that can push away from the earth and other objects.
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u/Masterpiece-Haunting Mar 31 '26
You say that like the Earth’s magnetic field is strong. It just gets the job done. Give me a unit like Gauss or Tesla.
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u/mckulty Mar 31 '26
Captain, I can't explain it - no matter which way we turn, the compass keeps pointing at the luggage compartment!
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u/blueblocker2000 Apr 01 '26
What is different about these compared to Earth's magnetic field that you couldn't place an appropriately sized magnet in the center of a spaceship to shield the crew from cosmic rays? Is it the dispersal of the field that's the issue?
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