Fabian's Astrophysics Website

I recently published software for performing scattering fits of time domain radio signals from Fast Radio Bursts or pulsars on the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL). Please find its description below.

Impulsive time domain radio signals, such as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) or pulsars pulses, undergo several propagation effects in …

I recently had the privilege and opportunity to travel to South Korea and present my research at the IAU General Assembly 2022 in Busan. In particular, I gave a face-to-face presentation at the IAU369 FRB symposium about my FRB research with the MeerKAT telescope.

Unfortunately, my outward flight from the …

If you want to learn what Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) are, have a look at these 1-2 minutes long videos recorded in various languages. It is pretty interesting to hear the same material spoken in serval languages. This effort was done as part of the IAU 2022 General assembly (IAUGA …

Our paper led by Dr Kaustubh Rajwade on the first three Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) reported by MeerTRAP was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. We report on their discoveries, localisations, scattering and scintillation properties and identify a potential host galaxy for one of them …

We discovered an ultra-slow spinning neutron star (~76 second period) that emits at radio frequencies with the MeerTRAP instrument at the MeerKAT telescope. The work was done in collaboration with many and led by Dr Manisha Caleb from MeerTRAP and Dr Ian Heywood from ThunderKAT. The paper was recently accepted …

Our paper led by PhD student Tiaan Bezuidenhout on the first twelve Galactic sources discovered with the MeerTRAP single-pulse search instrument at the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa was accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It reports on twelve discoveries of what might …

I recently gave an invited talk (my first one!) about the broadband emission of neutron stars for the SPINS-UK seminar series. I outlined what we know so far about the pulsar emission, i.e. how pulsars shine, and I illustrated how wideband radio observations and profiles could help us …

Over the last week or two, I performed a general overhaul of the website, adding tags throughout the news section, updating and polishing the front page, and expanding my research page significantly. In particular, I extended the descriptions and added links to my publications that you can look at for …

Our paper led by Emma Platts on a sample of bursts from the repeating Fast Radio Burst (FRB) source called FRB 121102 was recently accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It reports a more in-depth analysis of several bursts from that FRB source …

I recently published some of the educational material online that I used to solve various example problems or to demonstrate different software programming concepts. The material collection so far contains four example projects that range from plotting a modified parabolic function to a simple Bomberman-inspired video game.

I primarily …

Back in early 2019, we observed several pulsars to better characterise their emission properties at radio frequencies and to do so systematically. Serendipitously, we caught one of the pulsars, PSR J1452-6036, about 3 hours after it had suffered a sudden spin-up event (or glitch) in its otherwise stable rotation. The …

Our paper on the magnetar J1935+2154 (led by Ben Stappers) recently got accepted for publication in the MNRAS journal and is now on the arXiv. We place strict upper limits on its radio and optical emission shortly after its Fast Radio Burst-like outburst in April to June 2020, derived …

Today I relocated the website from its old location on Swinburne University’s webserver to a new server. The move simplifies a couple of technical details behind the scenes and allows for faster access for European and US visitors. Apart from the move, nothing has changed.

I have a new publication on the arXiv this week. It is a short conference proceedings paper (ADASS XXX 2020) on some technical development work that we did (and are still working on) as part of the MeerTRAP project regarding real-time triggering techniques for Fast Radio Bursts. I am pretty …

Today I switched the website to HTTPS secured access by default. The main benefit for the visitors is that the data transmission in now authenticated, as well as encrypted.

Here is my contribution to the Early Career Researcher poster exhibition of the Royal Astronomical Society about our “Searches for Fast Radio Bursts with the MeerKAT telescopes”.

I had to summarise and abstract our work quite drastically, and I tried to use non-technical language as far as possible so that …

I am part of a collaborative paper in which we report on the timing and spectral properties of the new magnetar Swift J1818.0-1607 in the first month or so after it became visible at radio frequencies.

The observations were performed with the 100-m Effelsberg telescope in Germany, telescopes at …

Today I gave a short public talk about my research at Jodrell Bank Observatory as part of the ‘Meet the Expert’ session. After the presentation, there were about 30 minutes of questions where people could ask me anything related to astronomy, astrophysics or physics in general (this is a somewhat …

Late last year, I released the high-level observing software used for the UTMOST pulsar timing programme I paper through the Astrophysics Source Code Library. It contains monitoring and scheduling tools that we developed as part of the UTMOST project for the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Telescope (MOST), including the fully-autonomous dynamic …

Today I participated in the 2019 machine learning hack night at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Manchester. A completely unknown machine learning and data analysis challenge was presented, together with previously unknown Python tools that were useful for analysing the data. This year’s challenge was …