The magnetosphere of a rapidly rotating, strongly magnetized neutron star with aligned magnetic and rotational axes (parallel rotator) is modelled numerically. Including the radiation of the particles accelerated to relativistic energies as an efficient damping mechanism, we obtain a quasi-stationary selfconsistent solution to this classical problem. The numerical simulation, which was started from the well-known vacuum solution, yields a global magnetospheric structure that can be characterized by two regions of oppositely charged particles, which eventually produce a relativistic pulsar wind, separated by a vacuum gap of considerable extent.
This paper reports on progress we have made in modelling cosmic X·ray sources on supercomputers. The results we present are meant to serve as an example for the fact that sophisticated visualization techniques play a crucial role in scientific computing. Among the graphical methods we demonstrate, raytracing in curved space-time and a physically motivated 3D-volume rendering algorithm might be of interest to the graphics community in general.
