FRBSTATS is a user-friendly web interface that includes an open-access catalogue of FRBs published up to date, along with a highly accurate statistical overview of the observed events.
The platform supports the retrieval of fundamental FRB data either directly through the FRBSTATS API, or in the form of a CSV/JSON-parsed database, while enabling the plotting of parameter distributions for a variety of visualizations. These features allow researchers to conduct more thorough population studies, while narrowing down the list of astrophysical models describing the origins and emission mechanisms behind these sources (Platts et al., 2019).
Lastly, the platform provides a visualization tool that illustrates associations between primary bursts and repeaters, complementing basic repeater information provided by the Transient Name Server (TNS).
FRBSTATS is a fully open-source platform. Anyone is welcome to contribute with code, data and ideas for improvement.
If the FRBSTATS platform contributes to work that leads to publication, please acknowledge the project by citing it.
FRB population studies deem the importance of having a reliable & up-to-date database containing fundamental information about all FRB events discovered to date.
The first effort to catalogue FRBs began with FRBCAT (Petroff et al., 2016). Since July 2020 however, FRBCAT has been deprecated. Although all events (up to date) are now submitted to the TNS, the platform appears to have a lot of issues that limit FRB population studies:
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Data completeness: Many FRB events listed on the TNS catalogue lack fundamental properties (e.g. for many events, the flux density is either missing, or contains a
0, which can confuse automation software that obtain TNS data for statistical analysis and yield inaccurate results). -
Unit errors: Events with incorrect units (e.g. mJy listed instead of Jy) have been observed.
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Reliability: There is little to no data traceability that permits the verification of event parameters, and Discovery Reports pages are broken.
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Accessibility: TNS is great for optical transients like supernovae, but navigating through the data of the FRB catalogue is not very convenient, as the user is exposed to columns that are not as relevant to FRBs as they are to optical transients (e.g.
Class,Discovery Data Source/s(identical toReporting Group/s),Disc. Internal Name(no clear meaning, possible deprecated designation),Public(all events are set toY),Discovery Filter,Sender(too similar toReporting Group/sto matter to most users)), and not exposed to columns that are more meaningful (e.g.Width,Fluence,Center frequency,S:N). -
Maintenance: The TNS group has been notified of some of these problems through their contact page, but unfortunately no response has been received. This creates various accessibility issues regarding corrections, modifications and additions to the catalogue by the community (whereas, FRBSTATS enables direct modifications by the community with a simple pull request or issue).
In contrast, FRBSTATS aims to tackle all of these barriers, by researching and manually verifying the parameters of (hopefully all) FRB events, and providing a decentralized platform for anyone to access, modify and make corrections to the listed data directly.
On top of serving an open-access catalogue, the FRBSTATS platform provides fundamental statistics about the FRBs discovered up to date, such as:
- The total observed events as a function of time (MJD);
- Repeaters vs one-off events;
- Galactic sources and
- Event coverage (%).
Additionally, the platform enables astronomers and researchers to rapidly plot parameter distributions for a variety of visualizations, concerning FRB population studies and more, without having to download and install any packages on their machine locally. All parametric plots are displayed on the web, as all computations are carried out by the server automatically.
To submit a burst to the FRBSTATS catalogue, please append the event's properties as a new row to the FRBSTATS spreadsheet. If the FRB is already present in the sheet (i.e., an entry with the given designation already exists), the cell will turn red to inform you of the duplicate entry. The database gets updated on an hourly basis (and immediately when a commit is pushed), so the new entry may not be picked up immediately.