Galactic Magnet

The center of the galaxy is dangerous. It’s dominated by a supermassive black hole. And to make things more hazardous, one of its closest neighbors is a magnetar — the ultra-dense corpse of a once-mighty star. It spins once every 3.8 seconds, emitting a “pulse” of energy with each spin. That makes it a pulsar. And it has a magnetic field that may be a trillion times stronger than Earth’s — fatal at a range of thousands of miles.
Quite a few pulsars inhabit the galaxy’s core. But the magnetar is the closest one to the black hole. Astronomers are trying to find out if there's a connection — if there's something about the environment near the black hole that favors the formation of a magnetar.
Using a giant radio dish in Australia, they’ve already found that the magnetar’s pulses are spread out — like looking at a bright light through frosted glass. That could mean that the pulses are passing through a cloud of charged particles. And there’s a difference between pulses, which could be rev