X-ray bursts are highly energetic releases of radiation from the surfaces of neutron stars, triggered by the explosive burning of material accumulated on the surface. It’s the same type of burning that happens in the cores of ordinary stars like the sun, but in this case, happening on the surface. Thus, unlike the sun, where it takes hundreds of thousands of years for this radiation to escape—and in a much weaker form—it happens almost instantly in an X-ray burst. This means that anything surrounding the neutron star is going to get blasted with radiation.
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2020-01-neutron-star-blasts.html