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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 May 2016
If one is interested in issues related to the birth and evolution of neutron stars, a promising avenue of research begins with the study of the byproducts of a Type II supernova event, namely a pulsar (PSR) and its supernova remnant (SNR). However, it has long been a matter of some embarrassment that out of the more than 600 known PSRs and the 175 catalogued SNRs there are few associations. In fact, for nearly 15 years following the discovery of PSRs only the Crab and Vela PSRs had an associated remnant. This failure has spawned something of a cottage industry to “explain away” the low incidence of PSR/SNR associations. Beaming (Frail & Moffett 1993; Narayan & Schaudt 1988), injection (Narayan 1987), field growth (Blandford, Applegate & Hernquist 1983) and black-hole formation (Chevalier 1994) have been invoked in this context at one time or another.