"There's this fantastic quote: You can measure a man's ignorance by the strength of his magnetic field," said Susan Clark, an astrophysicist at Stanford University. "In other words, when we have a piece of a problem historically in astrophysics that we don't fully understand, just blame the magnetic field. Just wave our hands and say, 'Ah! The magnetic field!'" Exactly how this fundamental force helps sculpt our galaxy has long eluded scientists, largely because measuring the galactic magnetic field is a considerable challenge. Unable to detect it directly, astronomers tease out clues by studying dust that has been aligned by the magnetic field and the light that passes through this dust.