Fabian's Astrophysics Website

Our redshift 2.148 FRB Science paper (Caleb et al. 2026) is published now, as well as the press releases! Hurray!

It reports the localisation of the host galaxy of the most distant precisely localised fast radio burst (FRB) to date. This work used two world-leading telescopes: the MeerKAT telescope …

Some of the SKAO Science Book Chapters (“Advancing Astrophysics with the SKA II”) have appeared on the arXiv recently, with an overview given at the link below.

SKAO Science Book Overview

Unfortunately, the links in that document do not currently work, and you have to search for the publications manually …

I attended the Paris SKA conference at Paris Observatory - PSL in Meudon this week. I gave a poster presentation titled “Pulsar Radio Phenomenology and Fundamental Physics”, which summarised the key pulsar observables and some of our recent work on an approachable level, targeted at non-experts.

Here is the abstract:

In …

After an earlier wave of Zenodo submissions in February, I published my slides on absolute flux density calibrating beam-formed pulsar data from the NenuFAR beam model & polarisation meeting 2025 on Zenodo.

Here is the DOI link:

Absolute Flux Density Calibration of Pulsar Data, Paris Meudon, France

After the initial work last year, I released a new version (v0.5.0) of my scatfit pulse profile modelling and fitting software for FRBs and pulsar pulses.

This is a major feature release that implements all functionality of a multi-component mode.

This allows one to simulate and fit bursts …

In early 2025, shortly after starting my new position with Paris Observatory - PSL and returning from the UK, I was interviewed for an FRB special in the BBC Science Focus Magazine.

In the hustle and bustle of the unusually busy conference summer of 2025, I forgot to share the write-up …

In April 2025, I gave an invited review talk about FRBs called “Fast Radio Bursts: An observational perspective” at the Les Houches workshop in the French Alps, near Chamonix. This was done as part of the Feeling the pull and the pulse of relativistic magnetospheres conference, which brought together world …

This week, I published some of my recent conference slides and posters on the Zenodo website. This is beneficial because it makes them more widely available and because Zenodo assigns a static DOI to each upload. It is easy to cite and reference my conference publications this way, for instance …

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 on fast radio bursts (FRBs) and what we know about them from an observational perspective.

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 …