Fabian's Astrophysics Website

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 …

I recently remotely attended the SALF IX conference, where I presented a one-slide summary of our work on the single-pulse properties of radio pulsars as a pre-recorded video.

The screenshot below shows my summary slide, and a local copy of my sparkler video is available, too.

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 …

Killian Lebreton recently finished his Master’s M2 research project with us with waving flags. He did an excellent defence presentation and wrote a strong Master’s thesis report. He will graduate from the University of Orléans’ Physics programme in early 2024.

I was his day-to-day supervisor over the last …

My MeerKAT FRB paper was accepted for publication!

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

We present a sample of well-localised Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) discovered by the MeerTRAP project at the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. We discovered the three FRBs in single coherent tied-array …

We had a good representation of the Orléans/Nançay pulsar and FRB team at the 2023 Kerastari neutron star & FRB meeting in Greece. Overall, we had five talks from the group covering topics from FRBs and pulsars to SETI.

It was a truly excellent meeting! The talk quality and topic …

I recently started a new academic research position at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the Université d’Orléans in the beautiful city of Orléans, France. I will work on pulsars and Fast Radio Bursts as part of a more extensive multi-wavelength collaboration and with several radio …

We had a bit of a “paper splash” today with 4 new MeerTRAP FRB papers posted on the arXiv this morning. I just wanted to quickly share the excitement with you, as it is quite a rare opportunity, at least for such a significant release.

Please find the links to …

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 …