Fabian's Astrophysics Website

I recently submitted the Science Using Single-Pulse Exploration with Combined Telescopes (SUSPECT) paper I to the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal and submitted it to the arXiv shortly afterwards. It gives an overview of the SUSPECT multi-telescope observing project and demonstrates several new data analysis techniques on a small subset of the …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

We have detected a new Fast Radio Burst (FRB) in real time at the Molonglo Observatory Synthesis Radio Telescope in Australia. In total, that makes it the 6th FRB discovered as part of the UTMOST project. We encourage follow-up observations at all wavelengths. The relevant details can be found in …