Also does anyone know how those ultra strong magnets are affecting our planet if at all?
Edit: sorry the [link](https://imamagnets.com/en/blog/what-is-most-powerful-magnet/#:~:text=The%20world’s%20most%20powerful%20magnet%20is%2044.14%20Teslas.&text=This%20super%20magnet%20has%20a,we%20find%20in%20a%20hospital) says 900,000 times the earths magnetism
Edit 2: Thank you wonderful people for clearing that up. Your minor support did more for my mental health than you realize not just for the knowledge but also the general support from the community. Y’all are amazing.
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We do have to take them into account. Some iron takes on a magnetic field parallel to the earth’s fields when it is heated or struck percussively. This happens when it is built, so the direction it is facing when it is built will mess with the compass.
Some iron takes on these fields constantly
Ships are made of iron, so the ship’s compass has to adjust for this. There’s a lot of simple tech using magnets that do this in the Binnacle.
Here’s a video I recently watched about it:
It’s because the earth *is* the magnet. The iron core, the ‘shell’ that you see as the northern lights when radiation hits it. You’re within that field so no man-made magnet will have a chance.
Magnetic fields strength are usually measured in gauss, they are now usually measured in microteslas, but i am entirerly unfamiliar with those numbers, so gauss it will be. Anyway, earths magnetism averages out at around 0.6ish gauss, i believe it varies from .3 to .7, but dont quote me on that, humans also measure on this scale, going from 0.000000001 to 0.0001, which means the earths gravity is 6000 times our own at its most powerful, but considering these numbers are from the late 70s, 1979, im pretty sure we could do more accurate readings today, cause thats a fuc huge variation.
So, we agreed upon that the earths gravity is .6 gauss, well a common household magnett is 100 gauss, an MRI scanner goes up to 70 000 gauss, and the most powerful magnetic field ever produced on earth is at 450 000 gauss, so a magnet that is 600 times more powerful then the earths magnetic field would be a paltry 360 gauss.
So lets say you get a grade N42 neodymium magnet in your hand, it can have a gauss betweek 13-15k, so why is this fist sized magnet not as powerful as the earth, well, its simple, its size, the earths iron core got an estimated volume of 7 600 000 000 000 000 square kilometers, or 7.6 billion sqkm, well the volume of a N42 magnet at magnetshop.com has a volume of 1.57 square cm, and there are 10 000 000 000 square cm in a square km, that is 10 billion sq cm in a sq km.
To add some more pointless perspective a magnetar, the most magnetically powerful objects in the universe goes in at 10E15, or 10 quadrillion gauss, but even with that strength, that magnetar is 9000 light year away.
So while there are certain things on earth that can produce magnetic fields powerful enough to affect compasses, most of them are focused into a location, such as an MRI is focused mostly to the MRI room.
“F’n magnets how do they work?”
I remember learning in an orienteering class that there’s a large iron deposit in the northern US/Canada that makes compasses deviate toward it within the particular region we were trying to navigate, and we were supposed to adjust our compass readings accordingly. So short answer, less magnets can and do affect compass readings. Other answers have explained why that’s usually not a big deal when we’re talking about super strong magnets with masses a fraction of the mass of Earth’s core.
The field size of earths magnetic field is very large, those super magnets that are difficult to pull apart however are much smaller. Scale such an object up to a planetary size and a compass would in fact react to such a large field.
So in this case size matters more than strength, as a magnet that is able to create a magnetic field on a planetary scale is going to allow compass needles to detect the field where a small magnet that isn’t the size of a planet requires the compass to be within the field, which if you hold the compass close enough that will occur. Basically imagine the magnet is the entire planet and the compass is close enough to the very big magnet that this is why it works in such a manner.
Measure the brightness of the brightest star in the night sky, you’ll get something ridiculously low, thousands of times lower than if you point the device towards a flashlight in the room.
Now does the flashlight deliver more light than a thousands stars ? absolutely not.
Energy decreases drastically with distance. The magnet’s field is stronger than Earth’s when you’re very close to it. As soon as you get away, it’s not even detectable.
It is like the difference between a fire hose, and a river. A fire hose moves water at a higher velocity, but the river moves more water further.
The magnetic attraction is observed in a small spot extremely enclosed within the core of the magnet. So you wouldn’t feel the magnetic pull even more than a couple meters away from the magnet itself.
Source: I conducted research for a couple years on the strongest magnet in the world (in this same laboratory).
If you stand under a commercial AC vent blowing on you in the hottest desert you will get cold. The AC vent is not stronger than the sun, it’s just closer.
Earth’s magnetic field is like the sun. The AC is like a man made magnet.
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