Axions are hypothetical particles that couple extremely weakly to regular matter, 
which makes them challenging to probe in the laboratory.  However, axions should be 
produced in the dense environments of compact stars, providing an additional cooling 
channel that leads to well-known constraints on the axion’s couplings to matter.  
These constraints are indirect, and although compact stars are predicted to “glow” 
in axions, this radiation is invisible to us.  In this talk I will discuss how the 
axion radiation is converted into X-ray emission in the strong magnetic field that 
surround many compact stars, thereby providing a new strategy for probing axions 
through X-ray observations of magnetic white dwarf stars.