Fabian's Astrophysics Website

My scatfit pulse/FRB simulation and scattering fit software recently gained the capability to simulate and fit pulses or bursts that consist of multiple components. Before that, the software was limited to profiles that a single exponentially modified Gaussian component could well describe.

I recently presented our current work from the SUSPECT project at the Les Houches conference in the French Alps near Chamonix.

Additionally, I gave an invited review talk about fast radio bursts (FRBs) and what we know about them from the observational side.

Our paper on FRB optical constraints was accepted for publication in the journal MNRAS!

Our SUSPECT project overview paper (paper I) was accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A)!

Please find the abstract and selected plots from the paper below.

Context. Radio pulsars exhibit a plethora of complex phenomena at the single-pulse level. However, the intricacies of their radio emission remain …

Our paper on FRB multiwavelength constraints was accepted for publication!

Over the weekend, I created a website for our SUSPECT (Science Using Single-Pulse Exploration with Combined Telescopes) pulsar observing project. In this project, we characterise and try to understand the wideband pulsar radio emission with high-sensitivity multi-frequency observations obtained from several radio telescopes in Europe and India. We aim to …

I recently attended the AstroRadioFr24 conference at the École normale supérieure (ENS) in the heart of Paris, where I presented two talks about radio pulsars and fast radio bursts (FRBs). The conference also aimed to prepare the French radio astronomy community for the arrival of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA …

I maintain a software tool called scatfit, which I designed and implemented in 2022 to perform scattering fits of very low-S/N fast radio burst (FRB) data. Its primary aim is to measure the scatter broadening incurred by a radio signal (impulse) as it traverses various Galactic and extragalactic turbulent …

The comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is nicely visible from central France. The best time to observe it currently is shortly after 20:00 CEST, i.e. about 50 minutes after sunset and roughly 30 minutes before it sets.

It becomes visible in the West at low elevations above …

We had the Fête de la science 2024 science festival at the CNRS research campus in Orléans this weekend, 5 - 6. October. Each of the institutes on the CNRS campus presented itself and its research activities to the public in a simplified and (hopefully) entertaining way.

The LPC2E institute, which …

As of 2024, emails are typically received through Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) servers, where the individual emails are kept in a centralised storage. This has the advantage that you can access them from several email clients or devices and always see the complete set of emails in the same …

Elie Daoura’s Master’s M2 student research project with us ended recently. I was his day-to-day supervisor over the last five months, together with Dr. Jean-Mathias Griessmeier.

We wish him all the best in his future career and good luck with his applications.

I recently submitted the Science Using Single-Pulse Exploration with Combined Telescopes (SUSPECT) paper I to the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal and submitted it to the arXiv shortly afterwards. It gives an overview of the SUSPECT multi-telescope observing project and demonstrates several new data analysis techniques on a small subset of the …

The MeerTRAP team recently discovered the first repeating fast radio burst (FRB), FRB 20240619D, with the MeerKAT telescope. Despite the MeerKAT discoveries of dozens of apparently one-off FRBs, canonical radio pulsars, and long-period radio sources, this is the first discovery of a clearly repeating FRB source with MeerKAT.

Here is …

For future reference, the following recipe works well to get CNRS Eduroam WiFi access working on a Macbook Pro.

Eduroam configuration website.

The linked website provides a “mobile profile” setup file, including the right certificate that will be installed under System Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Other -> Profiles -> User -> eduroam. You will …

I recently submitted the following three photos to the 2024 CNRS photo competition called “Regarde la science”. Please see the images and their descriptions below.

Caption: Overview of the Nançay Radio Astronomical Observatory. The photo shows the three main radio telescopes that our research group uses to observe radio pulsars …

I recently attended the MeerKAT@5 conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa. The conference celebrated the first (approximately) five years of science operations of the MeerKAT telescope array. I presented the “Sample Properties and Implications from the MeerTRAP FRBs Discovered with MeerKAT” as a contributed poster.

Fortunately, the organisers made most …

Here is a recent group photo of the CNRS Orléans/Nançay pulsar and Fast Radio Burst team as of February 2024. The two PhD students were present for the photo, but the 2024 Master’s students had not yet arrived. Other team members who are primarily based at the Nançay …

So far, I have always maintained my publication list manually as a LaTeX file, adding new publications as they were accepted or made public. However, doing so was an extremely tedious and frankly dull task, more so because some application processes require you to submit separate lists that include all …

I recently uploaded our scatfit pulse profile scattering fit and simulation software to the official Python Package Index (PyPI). That means you can install it simply by typing

$ pip install scatfit

in one of your shell windows.

As scatfit includes compiled binary extensions to speed up the model evaluation (by …