Fabian's Astrophysics Website

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 …

Before the bustle leading up to the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, my UTMOST pulsar timing programme paper got accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The publication can be accessed online via the Astrophysics Data System. In that paper, we report updated …

A collaborative paper (Meyers et al.) reporting on the spectral properties of the highly intermittent pulsar J1107-5907 at radio frequencies has recently been accepted for publication.

The publication presents the analysis of simultaneous radio observations of the pulsar with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) and the refurbished Molonglo Synthesis Radio …

We have discovered two fast radio bursts (FRBs) in short succession as part of the ongoing search programme at the Molonglo Observatory Radio Telescope. They are FRB181016 and FRB181017, respectively. We summarise their detection UTCs, their right-ascensions, their declinations (J2000) and the dispersion measures (DMs) that maximise the signal-to-noise ratios …

We have detected a fast radio burst (FRB) as part of the SUPERB project at the Parkes radio telescope. It was discovered on 2018-09-23-04:03:38.06 UTC in the central beam (beam 1) of the 1.4 GHz multi-beam receiver. The FRB has a dispersion measure of 548 pc …

We have detected another pulsar glitch at the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Radio Telescope in Australia, where we are observing more than 400 radio pulsars regularly, mainly with very high cadence. This one happened in the pulsar J1709-4429 and is by far the smallest one ever reported in this pulsar. The …