Open to international collaborators, this high magnetic field will hopefully help scientists make innovations in material science -- particularly in the realm of superconductors.

Humans love their world records. It's one reason why there's an entire organization dedicated to keeping track of them -- no matter how obscure. And while the world's loudest burp (112.7 decibels!) is itself incredible feat, world records in science tend to lead to more profound discoveries about the nature of the universe.

Take, for instance, magnets. On September 22, the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Steady High Magnetic Field Laboratory (CHMFL) successfully sustained a magnetic field of 42.02 tesla with a resistive magnet -- that's roughly 800,000 times stronger than Earth's magnetic field. The breakthrough ekes past the previous record of 41.4 tesla, set by the U.S. National High Magnetic Laboratory back in 2017.

This isn't the laboratory's first magnetic contribution, either. Back in 2022, the CHMFL created a hybrid magnet -- both resistive and superconducting -- that produced 45.22 tesla.

When it comes to steady high magnets, there are three primary kinds -- superconducting, resistive, and a hybrid combination of the two. Resistive magnets can create fields much more powerful than superconducting magnets, but the two together form a magnetic dream team. CHMFL's 45.22 tesla hybrid magnet is the most powerful of its kind.

"Resistive magnets and superconducting magnets are both 'singles masters,'" Kuang Guangli -- academic director of CHMFL -- said in a press statement, using tennis terminology to compare the types of magnets, "while hybrid magnets are 'mixed-doubles combinations.' In 2022, we won the mixed doubles championship with comprehensive advantages. Today, we won a singles."

But these powerful magnets are more than just another bout of geopolitcal one-upmanship. CHMFL's magnets are completely open for international collaboration, and will aid in new discoveries in the field of material science -- particularly in the realm of superconductors. High magnetic fields have also served as the underlying technology that made nearly a dozen Nobel Prize-winning discoveries possible.

Of course, 42.02 Tesla is far from the upper limit of what's magnetically possible -- in fact, it's not even close. Astronomers currently know of 24 magnetars (neutron stars with incredibly powerful magnetic fields), and even more are awaiting official confirmation, that far outclass this measurement. And in 2022, a team of scientists using China's Insight-HXMT X-ray telescope to view Swift J0243.6+6124, which is an ultraluminous pulsar located in the Milky Way. In doing so, they discovered the strongest magnetic field ever recorded at 1.6 billion tesla -- roughly a million billion times stronger than Earth's magnetic field.

Maybe we should get started on a Guinness Book of Universe Records.