Fabian's Astrophysics Website

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

Here is some code to time align and splice (concatenate) different frequency lanes together. It is not fully verified yet, but works very well with my LOFAR offline converted test data in SIGPROC filterbank format.

Here is its GitHub repository.

Extending the code to handle PSRFITS and DADA files should …

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 …

Most of the Nançay/Orléans pulsar and transient team, along with myself, attended the Pulsar 2025 conference in Sardinia this week. The conference was a success and overall a great experience.

Here is a strongly compressed PDF version of my poster about single-pulse modulation properties with the SUSPECT project multi-frequency …

I recently presented our work on the Sub-GHz Radio Pulsar Emission - Lessons Learned and Predictions for SKA at the SKAO General Science Meeting in Görlitz, Germany. This included some of our NenuFAR Pulsar Census results and some work done as part of the SUSPECT project.

Here is a local copy …

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 …

This week, I participated in a busy day at Paris Meudon focused on calibrating data (beam model, polarization, pointing, flux densities) from the NenuFAR radio telescope. I gave a short presentation about my work on absolute flux density calibrating data from various radio telescopes, including NenuFAR, uGMRT, and LOFAR.

Here …

Our SUSPECT project overview paper (paper I) was accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A)!

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

Context. Radio pulsars exhibit a plethora of complex phenomena at the single-pulse level. However, the intricacies of their radio emission remain …

Over the weekend, I created a website for our SUSPECT (Science Using Single-Pulse Exploration with Combined Telescopes) pulsar observing project. In this project, we characterise and try to understand the wideband pulsar radio emission with high-sensitivity multi-frequency observations obtained from several radio telescopes in Europe and India. We aim to …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …