It is difficult to grasp the sheer dimensions of a supernova explosion and even more difficult to understand the concept of neutron star produced after the explosion. As a massive star collapses, the star’s core of about a Solar mass can be compressed into a ball with a radius of around ten kilometers. In the process, the gravitational field strength of this dying star would reach around a hundred billion times that of the Earth. In such extreme objects the magnetic field generated during the collapse reaches intensities of more than hundreds of million times stronger than Earth’s magnetic field and a billion (one thousand million) times stronger than medical magnetic resonance imaging machines. ...
