Copyright © 2011 Johan Hansson and Anna Ponga. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We argue that pulsars may be spin-polarized neutron stars, that is, cosmic permanent magnets. This would simply explain several observational facts about pulsars, including the “beacon effect” itself, that is, the static/stable misalignment of rotational and magnetic axes, the extreme temporal stability of the pulses, and the existence of an upper limit for the magnetic field strength, coinciding with the one observed in “magnetars.” Although our model admittedly is speculative, this latter fact seems to us unlikely to be pure coincidence.