An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics
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A highly magnetized → neutron star with fields a thousand times stronger than those of → radio pulsars. There are two sub-classes of magnetars, → anomalous X-Ray pulsar (AXP)s and → soft gamma repeater (SGR)s, that were thought for many years to be separate and unrelated objects. In fact SGRs and AXPs are both neutron stars possessing → magnetic fields of unprecedented strength of 10¹⁴ - 10¹⁶ G, and that show both steady X-ray pulsations as well as soft gamma-ray bursts. Their inferred steady X-ray luminosities are about one hundred times higher than their → spin-down luminosities, requiring a source of power well beyond the magnetic dipole spin-down that powers → rotation-powered pulsar (RPP)s. New high-energy components discovered in the spectra of a number of AXPs and SGRs require non-thermal particle acceleration and look very similar to high-energy spectral components of young rotation-powered pulsars (A. K. Harding, 2013, Front. Phys. 8, 679).

From magnet, contraction of → magnetic + -(s)tar, from → star.