And in other news.
This compresses the magnetic field into a tiny area extremely quickly. But, as the team predicted, it can’t be compressed for long, eventually creating a shock wave that rips the instrument apart. They expected this to happen after about 700 teslas, as that’s what it was built to withstand. But incredibly, it reached 1,200 before exploding.
This was one of you, wasn’t it?
Look, my magnetic field strength calculations were correct. It wasn’t my fault that Renaldo overcharged the capacitor bank.
Stranger
The Insane Clown Posse decided to do some science? 
(NSFW language in the link)
How does one distinguish between the intensity of a magnetic field as opposed to its overall magnitude? The Earth has a magnetosphere extending tens of thousands of miles into space; the hospital’s MRI scanner, not so much.
For reference, this magnet reached 1,200 Tesla. A magnetar may reach 100,000,000,000 Tesla. They still have a ways to go.
You can measure the energy if you wish. It’s roughly the field strength times the volume. For Earth, it’s roughly 3x1016 J. I don’t know what this one peaked at, but it must be 5x106 J as an upper bound, since that’s the size of their capacitor bank.
Misleading headline. Not your fault, the article is bad too. They blew up their instrument, not their lab.
But I bet they had fun doing it. Which is really the whole point of NSF: to ensure scientists have fun at work. So it was totally worth it.
Well, if scientists re-created the magnetic field of a magnetar on Earth, they’d wipe out all life on a continental scale , so let’s hope they don’t do that any time soon or any place close.
Here’s a video posted on BBC Earth’s Facebook page comparing the lab magnet and a magnetar. Sorry, I can’t seem to find it anywhere else online.
So how many of them got superpowers?
The earth is a dipole, so IIRC from baby E&M it decreases in strength with the cube or the radius.
I don’t what kind of equipment the folks in question were using, but the field outside of a solenoid like in an MRI is very low.
Actual footage of the experiment:
Which is why we must continue to appease the mighty magnetar with an annual offering of seven young men and seven young maidens.
And $7B of NSF funding.
If I accidentally stuck a magnetar to my refrigerator, what would be the best way to get it off?
Goo Gone. That stuff’ll remove anything.
Oh, the magnetic field of the magnetar is going warp the electron clouds of the refrigerator’s atoms. I don’t think there’ll be much of a refrigerator to remove it from. The problem solves itself.
To perhaps put that into better context, the energy density of a magnetar’s magnetic field is about a thousand times as dense as lead.
OK, that’s a terrible context. Humans can’t comprehend that kind of density, even for matter, and it’s just ludicrous for a field. But it at least illustrates just how far beyond human experience it is.
Energy density in an electromagnetic field is proportional to the square of the field.
Good catch (I knew I should have done the unit analysis). Which makes the magnetar comparison all the more incredible.
OK, that clip is much more plausible than the one @solost posted. That’s perfectly good cartoon physics. It’s just lousy live-action physics.