Fabian's Astrophysics Website

This week, we hosted the Science at Low Frequencies (SALF) conference 2025 in Orléans.

I generated a word cloud visualisation from my publication data on NASA ADS.

I did that using the excellent Python package wordcloud. However, it required a decent amount of data pre-processing and experimentation with the word cloud parameters. Please find the finished image below.

The font size of the words …

I recently published my new FitPDF distribution fitting software on GitHub. The FitPDF software suite fits complex mixture models of various distributions to observed data. This is useful for characterising pulsar or fast radio burst (FRB) pulse energy distributions.

FitPDF operates in a Bayesian and completely unbinned way, thereby maximising …

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.

The screenshots below show a simulated 2-component …

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.

Here is a local copy of my …

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

Our paper on FRB multiwavelength constraints was accepted for publication!

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …