If you've ever been told you have a "magnetic personality," let me introduce you to magnetars. That's not like an electric guitar operated by magnets, it's a type of neutron star, which is the super dense core left behind when a star goes supernova. But they're even more extreme because they have intense magnetic fields, like "a thousand trillion times stronger than Earth's" intense.

Astronomers are still debating how they get those fields, but we know that magnetars spin fast, like hundreds of times a second. We also know that magnetars contain some charged particles, and that spinning charge creates magnetic fields, but we're not sure that's definitely the culprit yet.

Either way, these things are so intense that we're probably lucky we only know of a few dozen of them in the universe, though astronomers do expect to find more. Just, hopefully, not too close to home.

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