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The writer could be refering to the type of Quark:

up, down,strange, charmed,bottom and top

All are names for types of Quarks.

Each name also can be come as a red, green or blue.

See page 65 in Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History Of Time

Or just could be calling the star strange.

That was mostly a joke.

I was aware of strange quarks, but unaware of whether any kind of ordinary matter collapse can actually leave you with only strange quarks. I forget what a neutron is made of, but I believe all the particles made of quarks require some mix of different ones.

Looking for help with same, I found This Rather Prescient Slide-Show Display.

Patrick's Washington Post article clarifies:

Neutrons are made up of three quarks, two so-called "down" quarks and one "up" quark. On Earth, free quarks do not exist and while their existence can be inferred from atom smasher data, none has ever been directly observed.
RXJ 1856, however, implies the existence of an entire star made up of free quarks, a so-called "strange quark star." In that case, some of the original up and down quarks would have been transformed into "strange" quarks (hence the name). Quark stars also could exist with an outer shell of neutrons and a core of free quarks.

For some reason, the normal neutron quarks change flavor and are all strange quarks in the Strange Quark Star. You got it. I suspected but was very unsure.

BTW, that "atom smasher" takes me back to the 50s. How old was the guy who wrote that article?

Daffynitions:

Quark - Four dimensional pixel defining the resolution of physical reality, set to various states and colors by thought, individual and aggregate.