Id say that 'light-house' style neutron stars are a natural rarity and in reality the kinds of rotations and offsets we see in game are more likely what is going on. We still only see neutron stars from the time when those jets sweep into our field of view, or if the star is accreting material which can make a binary system a huge x-ray source.
The reason i say this is that most things do rotate, and there is quite a lot of evidence that the positioning of magnetic fields in the case of a object like a star, is driven by the movement of material within the core, this in a manner of speaking represents potential energy and it is fair to say that, by compressing the original star, way past the Chandrasekhar limit into the formation of a neutron star, alignment of the magnetic and geographic pole would tend to be closer on average than it would further away.
(ie, in game most have an opening angle of 5-10 degrees)
Iv not run any numbers as id have no idea where to start in modelling the evolution of said fields haha, though more of one of those educated guesstimates
I know what you mean by the Chandrasekhar Limit, but I am not sure that's the correct way to express it. The Chandrasekhar Limit as far as I am aware is a mass limit not a size limit, about 1.4 times the mass of the sun, so a star smaller than the sun could still exceed the Chandrasekhar Limit, as could a star larger than the sun, the elemental composition of the star determines what happens after that I thought, most white dwarfs over the limit turn supernova, those that don't follow the gravitational collapse curve into either Neutron star or black hole. That's how I understood it worked anyway, a quick browse of common sources seem to indicate this is correct.
Of course we are conserving momentum as we compress, and since your common Neutron star is a fraction of the size of the original even a slowly rotating star compressed into a neutron star is going to be spinning like a top. Also the Neutron star's magnetic field is different to the earths, the earths magnetic poles can shift, reverse as well, but that's because it's generated by the liquid core, neutron stars don't have a liquid core of course, degenerate matter all the way through except for a very thin layer near the surface possibly, so the magnetic field is fixed and unmoving in relation to the geographic pole. I think the existence of the magnetic field is ascribed to a process called flux freezing but I'm not sure how that works.
Of course it would makes sense that a neutron star with an accretion disk should actually have more than just two jets of expelled matter/energy, one at each pole and others where it is absorbing matter at the equator, making entry to one of these systems really scary.
Does that all make sense or am I barking up the wrong tree?
