Astronomers Find Star Is a Powerful Magnet

The same rules apply to light. It's pretty easy to construct a light bulb with a filament which is hotter than the surface of the sun and which appears far brighter. But if you compare the sun and the light bulb at equal distances the sun is going to be brighter.

While it is not unusual for stellar objects to be magnetic, these are usually neutron stars. It is interesting to find something like this.

Almost all stars are point sources to us (i.e. they don't have a size), so you don't generally use a single image to get details. Instead you look at various wavelengths, though the use and combination of various optical devices (this is a whole massive field of research and engineering).

Radio astronomy looks at different wavelengths to optical astronomy, and because of atomic and molecular physics, you get different information.

If you're interested in this kind of stuff, go down to your local (university) library and see if you can borrow an undergrad introduction to astronomy (generally these will avoid most of the maths needed to actually do any work in the area, but cover enough of the concepts to be able to orient yourself in being able to look up stuff on wikipedia).

While you're still able to edit your comment, you might consider something like quoting the relevant part of the article at the top:

"Some stars, though, have much more powerful fields [...] neutron stars have magnetic fields 1 trillion times stronger than the Sun’s. As the massive [progenitor] star collapses, its magnetic field lines are packed into a much tighter space, and the field strength increases. But then there are magnetars: These neutron stars have fields 1,000 times stronger [...] and, given that most stars aren’t all that magnetic to begin with, those are more difficult to explain."

Or indeed, from the subtitle near the very top:

"and it might explain the origin of highly magnetic cinders known as magnetars"

and then suggest your physics SE link (or rather, the accepted answer) for more information on the magnetic fields of neutron stars -- including theories about their origin as "fossils" of the progenitor star (like, but not quite as magnetic as, the star discussed in the article, which may offer support for the "fossil" theory) and internal dynamics during the collapse into the neutron star, or even after the neutron star has formed.

The accepted answer there <https://physics.stackexchange.com/posts/526296/revisions > is a decent short read that is related to, and expands upon, the paragraph extracted above. However the answer and comments there are now several years old now, and are about an area of active research -- for example, one of the linked academic papers was less than a year old on the date the answer was submitted.

Or, perhaps you (and others) might do something like that next time, to do justice to an interesting and relevant link.

Finally, here is a link to the (open access) PDF of the paper published in Science, courtesy of the European Southern Observatory (and several of the authors' Canadian and European funding agencies): <https://www.eso.org/public/archives/releases/sciencepapers/e...>