  The prevailing view that magnetars' X-ray luminosities exceed their spin-down
luminosities is based on the assumption that the decay with distance of the
flux of the X-rays received from magnetars obeys the inverse-square law. The
results presented here, of testing the hypothesis of independence of
luminosities and distances of magnetars by means of the Efron-Petrosian
statistic, do not uphold this assumption however: they imply that the
observational data in the McGill Magnetar Catalog are consistent with the
dependence S\propto D^{-3/2} of the flux densities S of these objects on their
distances D at substantially higher levels of significance than they are with
the dependence S\propto D^{-2}. These results are not incompatible with the
requirements of the conservation of energy because the radiation process
described in Ardavan (2021, MNRAS, 507, 4530), by which the superluminally
moving current sheet in the magnetosphere of a neutron star is shown to
generate the slowly decaying X-ray pulses, is intrinsically transient. Once
their over-estimation is rectified, the ratios of X-ray to spin-down
luminosities of known magnetars turn out to be invariably lower than one. A
magnetar differs from other rotationally powered pulsars only in that it is
observed along a privileged latitudinal direction relative to its spin axis:
the closer is the line of sight to a direction in which the radiation from the
current sheet is focused, the higher the frequency content and the lower the
decay rate with distance of the observed radiation. The outbursts
characterizing the emission of a magnetar thus arise from sudden movements of
its spin or magnetic axes.
