Reporting in the journal Science, an international team of 50 researchers used data from the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), a satellite launched in December 2021 by NASA and the Italian Space Agency. The astronomers pulled info on the obliquely named neutron star 4U 0142+61. It's a special type of neutron star, called a magnetar, located approximately 13,000 lightyears from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia.
A magnetar is essentially what it sounds like: a neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field. There are only around 30 that we know of, probably because it is hard to find them. They are small and faint, only detectable during periods of enhanced activity, such as when they blast out enough high-energy electromagnetic radiation (think gamma rays or X-rays), which are otherwise hard to detect on Earth.
