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Abstract In 2007 we were part of a team that discovered the so-called “Lorimer Burst”, the first example of a new class of objects now known as fast radio bursts (FRBs). These enigmatic events are only a few ms in duration and occur at random locations on the sky at a rate of a few thousand per day. Several thousand FRBs are currently known. While it is now well established that they have a cosmological origin, and about 10% of all currently known sources have been seen to exhibit multiple bursts, the origins of these enigmatic sources are currently poorly understood. In this article, we review the discovery of FRBs and present some of the highlights from the vast body of work by an international community. Following a brief overview of the scale of the visible Universe in §1, we describe the key moments in radio astronomy (§2) that led up to the discovery of the Lorimer burst (§3). Early efforts to find more FRBs are described in §4 which led to the discovery of the first repeating source (§5). In §6, as we close out on the second decade of FRBs, we outline some of the many open questions in the field and look ahead to the coming years where many surprises are surely in store. 

Abstract Although neutron star–black hole binaries have been identified through mergers detected in gravitational waves, a pulsar–black hole binary has yet to be detected. While short-period binaries are detectable due to a clear signal in the pulsar’s timing residuals, effects from a long-period binary could be masked by other timing effects, allowing them to go undetected. In particular, a long-period binary measured over a small subset of its orbital period could manifest via time derivatives of the spin frequency incompatible with isolated pulsar properties. We assess the possibility of pulsars having unknown companions in long-period binaries and put constraints on the range of binary properties that may remain undetected in current data, but that may be detectable with further observations. We find that for 35% of canonical pulsars with published higher-order derivatives, the precision of measurements is not enough to confidently reject binarity (period ≳2 kyr), and that a black hole binary companion could not be ruled out for a sample of pulsars without published constraints if the period is >1 kyr. While we find no convincing cases in the literature, we put more stringent limits on orbital period and longitude of periastron for the few pulsars with published higher-order frequency derivatives (n≥ 3). We discuss the detectability of candidates and find that a sample pulsar in a 100 yr orbit could be detectable within 5–10 yr. 

Abstract Noise characterization for pulsar-timing applications accounts for interstellar dispersion by assuming a known frequency dependence of the delay it introduces in the times of arrival (TOAs). However, calculations of this delay suffer from misestimations due to other chromatic effects in the observations. The precision in modeling dispersion is dependent on the observed bandwidth. In this work, we calculate the offsets in infinite-frequency TOAs due to misestimations in the modeling of dispersion when using varying bandwidths at the Green Bank Telescope. We use a set of broadband observations of PSR J1643−1224, a pulsar with unusual chromatic timing behavior. We artificially restricted these observations to a narrowband frequency range, then used both the broad- and narrowband data sets to calculate residuals with a timing model that does not account for time variations in the dispersion. By fitting the resulting residuals to a dispersion model and comparing the fits, we quantify the error introduced in the timing parameters due to using a reduced frequency range. Moreover, by calculating the autocovariance function of the parameters, we obtained a characteristic timescale over which the dispersion misestimates are correlated. For PSR J1643−1224, which has one of the highest dispersion measures (DM) in the NANOGrav pulsar timing array, we find that the infinite-frequency TOAs suffer from a systematic offset of ∼22μs due to incomplete frequency sampling, with correlations over about one month. For lower-DM pulsars, the offset is ∼7μs. This error quantification can be used to provide more robust noise modeling in the NANOGrav data, thereby increasing the sensitivity and improving the parameter estimation in gravitational wave searches. 

Abstract Using neural networks, we integrate the ability to account for Doppler smearing due to a pulsar’s orbital motion with the pulsar population synthesis package psrpoppy to develop accurate modeling of the observed binary pulsar population. As a first application, we show that binary neutron star systems where the two components have highly unequal mass are, on average, easier to detect than systems that are symmetric in mass. We then investigate the population of ultracompact (1.5 minutes ≤ P b ≤ 15 minutes) neutron star–white dwarf (NS–WD) and double neutron star (DNS) systems, which are promising sources for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna gravitational-wave detector. Given the nondetection of these systems in radio surveys thus far, we estimate a 95% confidence upper limit of ∼1450 and ∼1100 ultracompact NS–WD and DNS systems in the Milky Way that are beaming toward the Earth, respectively. We also show that using survey integration times in the range 20 s–200 s with time-domain resampling will maximize the signal-to-noise ratio as well as the probability of detection of these ultracompact binary systems. Among all the large-scale radio pulsar surveys, those that are currently being carried out using archival data collected with the Arecibo radio telescope have a ∼50%–80% chance of detecting at least one of these systems using current integration integration times and ∼80%–95% using optimal integration times in the next several years. 

Abstract We present an analysis of a densely repeating sample of bursts from the first repeating fast radio burst, FRB 121102. We reanalyzed the data used by Gourdji et al. and detected 93 additional bursts using our single-pulse search pipeline. In total, we detected 133 bursts in three hours of data at a center frequency of 1.4 GHz using the Arecibo telescope, and develop robust modeling strategies to constrain the spectro-temporal properties of all of the bursts in the sample. Most of the burst profiles show a scattering tail, and burst spectra are well modeled by a Gaussian with a median width of 230 MHz. We find a lack of emission below 1300 MHz, consistent with previous studies of FRB 121102. We also find that the peak of the log-normal distribution of wait times decreases from 207 to 75 s using our larger sample of bursts, as compared to that of Gourdji et al. Our observations do not favor either Poissonian or Weibull distributions for the burst rate distribution. We searched for periodicity in the bursts using multiple techniques, but did not detect any significant period. The cumulative burst energy distribution exhibits a broken power-law shape, with the lower- and higher-energy slopes of −0.4 ± 0.1 and −1.8 ± 0.2, with the break at (2.3 ± 0.2) × 10 37 erg. We provide our burst fitting routines as a Python package burstfit 4 4 https://github.com/thepetabyteproject/burstfit that can be used to model the spectrogram of any complex fast radio burst or pulsar pulse using robust fitting techniques. All of the other analysis scripts and results are publicly available. 5 5 https://github.com/thepetabyteproject/FRB121102 

Abstract Evidence has emerged for a stochastic signal correlated among 67 pulsars within the 15 yr pulsar-timing data set compiled by the NANOGrav collaboration. Similar signals have been found in data from the European, Indian, Parkes, and Chinese pulsar timing arrays. This signal has been interpreted as indicative of the presence of a nanohertz stochastic gravitational-wave background (GWB). To explore the internal consistency of this result, we investigate how the recovered signal strength changes as we remove the pulsars one by one from the data set. We calculate the signal strength using the (noise-marginalized) optimal statistic, a frequentist metric designed to measure the correlated excess power in the residuals of the arrival times of the radio pulses. We identify several features emerging from this analysis that were initially unexpected. The significance of these features, however, can only be assessed by comparing the real data to synthetic data sets. After conducting identical analyses on simulated data sets, we do not find anything inconsistent with the presence of a stochastic GWB in the NANOGrav 15 yr data. The methodologies developed here can offer additional tools for application to future, more sensitive data sets. While this analysis provides an internal consistency check of the NANOGrav results, it does not eliminate the necessity for additional investigations that could identify potential systematics or uncover unmodeled physical phenomena in the data. 

ABSTRACT With the upcoming commensal surveys for Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs), and their high candidate rate, usage of machine learning algorithms for candidate classification is a necessity. Such algorithms will also play a pivotal role in sending real-time triggers for prompt follow-ups with other instruments. In this paper, we have used the technique of Transfer Learning to train the state-of-the-art deep neural networks for classification of FRB and Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) candidates. These are convolutional neural networks which work on radio frequency-time and dispersion measure-time images as the inputs. We trained these networks using simulated FRBs and real RFI candidates from telescopes at the Green Bank Observatory. We present 11 deep learning models, each with an accuracy and recall above 99.5 per cent on our test data set comprising of real RFI and pulsar candidates. As we demonstrate, these algorithms are telescope and frequency agnostic and are able to detect all FRBs with signal-to-noise ratios above 10 in ASKAP and Parkes data. We also provide an open-source python package fetch (Fast Extragalactic Transient Candidate Hunter) for classification of candidates, using our models. Using fetch, these models can be deployed along with any commensal search pipeline for real-time candidate classification. 

ABSTRACT The origin of fast radio bursts (FRBs) still remains a mystery, even with the increased number of discoveries in the last 3 yr. Growing evidence suggests that some FRBs may originate from magnetars. Large, single-dish telescopes such as Arecibo Observatory (AO) and Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have the sensitivity to detect FRB 121102-like bursts at gigaparsec distances. Here, we present searches using AO and GBT that aimed to find potential radio bursts at 11 sites of past gamma-ray bursts that show evidence for the birth of a magnetar. We also performed a search towards GW170817, which has a merger remnant whose nature remains uncertain. We place $$10\sigma$$ fluence upper limits of ≈0.036 Jy ms at 1.4 GHz and ≈0.063 Jy ms at 4.5 GHz for the AO data and fluence upper limits of ≈0.085 Jy ms at 1.4 GHz and ≈0.098 Jy ms at 1.9 GHz for the GBT data, for a maximum pulse width of ≈42 ms. The AO observations had sufficient sensitivity to detect any FRB of similar luminosity to the one recently detected from the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154. Assuming a Schechter function for the luminosity function of FRBs, we find that our non-detections favour a steep power-law index (α ≲ −1.1) and a large cut-off luminosity (L0 ≳ 1041 erg s−1). 

Abstract We report the discovery of a highly circularly polarized, variable, steep-spectrum pulsar in the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) Variables and Slow Transients (VAST) survey. The pulsar is located about 1° from the center of the Large Magellanic Cloud, and has a significant fractional circular polarization of ∼20%. We discovered pulsations with a period of 322.5 ms, dispersion measure (DM) of 157.5 pc cm −3 , and rotation measure (RM) of +456 rad m −2 using observations from the MeerKAT and the Parkes telescopes. This DM firmly places the source, PSR J0523−7125, in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This RM is extreme compared to other pulsars in the LMC (more than twice that of the largest previously reported one). The average flux density of ∼1 mJy at 1400 MHz and ∼25 mJy at 400 MHz places it among the most luminous radio pulsars known. It likely evaded previous discovery because of its very steep radio spectrum (spectral index α ≈ −3, where S ν ∝ ν α ) and broad pulse profile (duty cycle ≳35%). We discuss implications for searches for unusual radio sources in continuum images, as well as extragalactic pulsars in the Magellanic Clouds and beyond. Our result highlighted the possibility of identifying pulsars, especially extreme pulsars, from radio continuum images. Future large-scale radio surveys will give us an unprecedented opportunity to discover more pulsars and potentially the most distant pulsars beyond the Magellanic Clouds.