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frbstats's Introduction

FRBSTATS

FRBSTATS: A web-based platform for visualization of fast radio burst properties

ascl:2106.028

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.


Citing FRBSTATS

If the FRBSTATS platform contributes to work that leads to publication, please acknowledge the project by citing it.


Statement of need

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:

  1. 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).

  2. Unit errors: Events with incorrect units (e.g. mJy listed instead of Jy) have been observed.

  3. Reliability: There is little to no data traceability that permits the verification of event parameters, and Discovery Reports pages are broken.

  4. 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 to Reporting Group/s), Disc. Internal Name (no clear meaning, possible deprecated designation), Public (all events are set to Y), Discovery Filter, Sender (too similar to Reporting Group/s to matter to most users)), and not exposed to columns that are more meaningful (e.g. Width, Fluence, Center frequency, S:N).

  5. 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.


Data contribution guidelines

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.

frbstats's People

Contributors

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frbstats's Issues

.htaccess trailing slash on dirs

.htaccess has to be modified accordingly to strip trailing slashes from directory URLs. This currently only works with .html and .php files.

Periodic FRBs - conference - dark mode

I really love the tree view of FRBs but it is not as insightful as cool it looks.

Maybe, it would be super cool if each repeater FRB has it's own burst v/s time plot.

There are atleast two known FRBs which have a periodicity (FRB20121102A, FRB20180916B). Would it possible to show the periodicity in action? A plot like Fig.3. of Marthi etal 2020.
I can put in the math here if you'd like.

There is an FRB2021 conference happening sometime in July online. Here's the advt
Although I don't know what the committee would decide, but if you haven't considered already, I urge you to submit an abstract/take-part/advertise in the conference! It would be really cool.

lastly, dark mode please

thanks

Dynamic updates

The following blocks need to be updating dynamically upon new catalogue entries:

  • Events observed
  • FRB repeaters
  • Galactic sources
  • Event coverage
  • FRB count vs MJD
  • FRB class

Automated repeater classification

Cluster analysis algorithms can be evaluated based on the current repeaters.json dataset (assuming 100% of the entries are true, which is most likely the case). This can dramatically skyrocket the autonomy of FRBSTATS and significantly reduce manual maintenance.

Classification parameters to be considered are probably l, b and DM. Everything else (other than RA/Dec. of course) may be dependant on the emission mechanism of the burst and/or detection instrument (telescope), which can introduce confusion.

Maybe l, b errors can be dynamically accepted based on the beamwidth of the telescope that observed the burst. That will hopefully not be necessary.

Addition to the API

Make it possbile to get the genereal stats (like total observerd events, repeaters, galactic sources, event coverage)
Maybe also accsess to the FRB Count over Time Graph, or the FRB Class graph (as png?)
Maybe also a filter option not to only search by name?!

Alternate row color

Slight row color alternations helps navigate through the data more conveniently.

Something like this could work:

table.dataTable td.sorting_1 { background-color: white; border:1px lightgrey; }
table.dataTable td { background-color: white;  border:1px lightgrey; }
table.dataTable tr.odd { background-color: white;  border:1px lightgrey; }
table.dataTable tr.even { background-color: white; border:1px lightgrey; }

The Data in Catalogue

Thank you for your efforts in providing visual FRB data.
I found that some data in the Catalogue needs to be checked again.
The flux of FRB 20190614D should be 0.124 Jy. @0xCoto

Catalogue completion

The FRBSTATS catalogue.csv contains 15 parameters (columns) per FRB, most of which are currently empty (cells denoted with x) and need to be filled. Some columns are directly derivable from the current dataset (since there is an injective transformation function for certain parameters):

  • utcmjd
  • (ra, dec) → (l, b)1
  • telescope & frequencysefd (? - this is only an approximation, ignoring time-wise Tsys variability)

The rest shall be obtained from the relevant publications. Additionally, verification is needed for the present data derived from TNS. In particular, the flux column is highly unreliable and requires careful examination, including the use of the correct unit (i.e. Jy and not mJy).

Columns filled:

  • FRB
  • UTC
  • MJD
  • Telescope
  • SEFD
  • RA
  • Dec.
  • l
  • b
  • Frequency
  • DM
  • Flux*
  • Width*
  • Fluence
  • S:N
  • Reference

*Severely underpopulated due to lacking TNS data.


1 This transformation can be very easily carried out with the help of the Astropy or Virgo package.

from virgo import galactic

# Convert RA/Dec. to Gal. Long./Lat. The position is returned as a tuple: (l, b)
galactic(ra, dec)

Implement FRB parameter columns

Current parameter columns

  • FRB
  • MJD
  • UTC
  • Telescope
  • Right ascension (α)1
  • Declination (δ)1
  • Galactic longitude (l)1
  • Galactic latitude (b)1
  • Center frequency (MHz)
  • Dispersion measure (pc cm⁻³)
  • Peak flux density (Jy)
  • Pulse width2 (ms)
  • Fluence (Jy ms)
  • Verification status/reference

1 Most probable position (generally determined by the telescope beam).
2 Generally the FWHM of a single-Gaussian fit to the FRB profile.

Inconsistent TNS FRB designation & flux units

The TNS contain an instance of FRB 20181130B, but no instance of FRB 20181130A. This may be an automatic error, because reporters are new to the designation (suffix letter format), and because the reported UTC time is 00:00:00, which is clearly inaccurate. Table 1 of the corresponding publication reports the exact MJD.

Same issues apply for FRB 20181118: while instances of FRB 20181118C and FRB 20181118D are present, no instances of FRB 20181118A or FRB 20181118B have been published to the TNS database.

(The TNS has published incorrect units for the flux density of these burst (mJy instead of Jy), but that's another issue.)

Flux and MJD corrections have been applied to the FRBSTATS catalogue and are visible on the online database.

Content no longer being displayed

There is no longer any content visible to populate the plots on the front page, and the repeater page is blank as well. Many of the data columns on the catalogue page are also no longer populating. I'm not sure if this is indicative of an issue on the frontend or in trying to query the existing database.

Change favicon

The favicon currently displays the HeRTA logo, but it would be prefferable if it showed the FRBSTATS logo (DB icon).

FRB alert system

An alert system shall be developed in order to notify subscribers of new FRB events via email, upon submission/disclosure to FRBSTATS/TNS. This is of high importance, as it permits astronomers to rapidly carry out critical (multi-wavelength) follow-up observations of FRB candidates.

Optimize FRB designation format

While there does not seem to be a well-defined standard for the precise FRB designation, the format that appears prevail in the literature is FRB YYYYMMDDabc.

Furthermore, it may be a good idea to strip the trailing A from non-repeaters that is present in FRB events on TNS.

Some random ideas 🤔

  • For dynamic plots, I was thinking of something like D3.js. It is quite powerful, and should allow us to make plots in galactic coordinates as well.
  • What if we transition the site to a framework like NextJS? I think it should make the overall code more simple, more condensed and more powerful.

Let me know what are your thoughts on these 😁 ! I might add more ideas as I have them 😅 .

Fetch ATel-reported & CHIME FRBs

Many recent (and old) FRBs are reported to The Astronomer's Telegram. Enabling the Fast Radio Burst filter is useful for checking every event against the FRBSTATS database and ensuring everything is entered in, as there is a strong suspicion that not all ATel FRB posts end up getting pushed to TNS, and they may eventually get lost.

How does FRBSTATS work?

I had a few questions about how FRBSTATS works. I am not very familiar with web design in any way, which is why I have absolutely no clue about how the site works or (more importantly) how it is deployed. Could you walk me through that? I think it would be nice to have those details in this issue for others to have a look as well, especially if they are thinking of contributing.

MPIfR suggestion batch

Plots

  • Flexible plots (e.g. Gal. latitude vs DM); leave it to the user to judge whether a parameter combination makes sense
  • Interactive plots

Catalogue rows

  • Redshift (progress: redshifts.py)
  • Localization area
  • RM & polarization properties (frac. linear and circular)
  • Scattering (temporal broadening and scint. bandwidth)

Database

  • FRB widths with 1e3-1e4 ms are dubious (duplicate of #23)

Misc

  • # FRB Source instead of FRB Count
  • Association with catalogued sources within errorbox (galaxies, supernovae, X-ray sources etc.) - see: http://cdsxmatch.u-strasbg.fr
  • Cross-reference positions and estimated redshifts of FRBs with the Nasa Extragalactic Database and find objects which could be potential sources

Display sky coordinate units

The coordinates of an event shall be listed with their corresponding units on the Web platform.

RA, Dec., Galactic Longitude and Latitude can be displayed like so:

Coordinate Current Format Example
α hh:mm:ss 13h18m03s
δ dd:mm:ss -29°37'52"
l deg 93.8°
b deg 15.9°

This can be applied to a web-oriented version of the CSV file, allowing the user to download the data as-is for further analysis locally.

FRB data plots

The identification of potential use cases for data plots provides valuable insights concerning the technical challenges behind graphical representations of FRB parameters.

Potential plots include, but are not limited to:

Line plot

  • Total FRB detection count vs MJD

Pie chart

  • Repeaters vs one-off events

(Stacked) bar chart

  • Event count vs Telescope vs Year

Scatter plot

  • Peak flux density vs Pulse width
    • DM may also be highlighted with a colormap on the scatter points
  • Fluence vs DM
  • RA vs Dec.
  • Gal. Long. vs Gal. Lat.
  • Fluence vs Center frequency
  • S:N vs SEFD

Class plots may also be used to highlight the detection instrument on scatter plots.

Open question (TBD): error bars?

Revise burst width outliers

Some events appear to have exceptionally wide burst widths. Most of these appear to be associated with Pushchino LPA, so these events have to be double-checked and revised according to the relevant publications.

In order to ensure maximum database reliability for population studies, if such observation data fail to appear reliable, all corresponding rows shall be dropped from catalogue.csv.

Checked Pushchino events

Neglect case sensitivity

While /FRBSTATS is recognized, /frbstats is not (case-sensitive URL). This should be fixed in order to help accessibility.

Create csv-to-json parser

The current DB infrastructure handles json files better, so a parser is required to act like an interface between (TNS-obtained) csv-formatted files and MongoDB.

API integration

An API needs to be built in order to allow developers to conveniently fetch, update, plot and experiment with database parameters.

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