🧪 Pulsar Magnetosphere Dynamics (2D)

The 3D original renders a pulsar's magnetosphere as a WebGL scene to look at; this 2D companion is built to be read instead. A rotating dipole — tilted by an adjustable obliquity angle from the spin axis — sweeps two radio beams around the star once per rotation, exactly as in the textbook "lighthouse model" of pulsar emission. A fixed line of sight to Earth, set at its own inclination angle, catches a beam once or twice per spin depending on the geometry you dial in; a folded pulse-profile strip below the controls accumulates those crossings over many rotations into the same kind of light curve real radio astronomers fold from pulsar timing data. Four sliders — rotation period, surface magnetic field, magnetic obliquity and observer inclination — feed directly into the physics: the light-cylinder radius (R_lc = cP/2π), the polar-cap opening angle of the beam, and the spin-down luminosity (Ė = (2/3c³)·μ²·Ω⁴·sin²χ, the same magnetic-dipole-radiation formula used to derive the Crab pulsar's ~4.6×10³⁸ erg/s spin-down power from its measured period) all update live as you drag them.