I'm just trying to mentally picture the experiment. Were you hanging a bar magnet from a string and measuring whether it was deflected toward the sample? Or were you pressing the magnet against the container and trying to see if the solution itself was visibly deflected?

While the manganese ions themselves do remain paramagnetic in solution, the chloride ions and more importantly the water itself are diamagnetic. I doubt you could make a solution concentrated enough to see visible deflection of a bar magnet.

There are a few direct ways to measure magnetic moments like using a Guoy balance, an Evans balance, or the Evans NMR method.

Do you mind if I ask loosely why you're interested in it?

It just depends on whether the metal ion's spin state changes when it is aquated. Aqueous manganese(ii) [Mn(H20)6]2+ does remain paramagnetic in solution. I don't understand how the experiment you ran was supposed to detect this though.

Comparing network solids to small molecule compounds isn't what's confusing. Calling diamond an outlier is confusing, it's not even the most thermodynamically stable allotrope of carbon under ambient conditions. There are also countless other comparable network solids that behave like diamond (like boron nitride). My gripe is that there's absolutely nothing special about diamond from the standpoint of "bond strength," so calling it an outlier is weird.

I'm confused by how diamond is an outlier. The bond dissociation energies in diamond are basically the same as any other C-C single bond.

I'm pretty sure OP meant near the center, not directly at the center, in which case yes the night sky would be much brighter than on earth.