Subjects:Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
The study of fast radio bursts (FRBs) is of great importance, and is a topic that has been extensively researched, particularly in recent years. While the extreme nature of FRBs can serve as a tool for researchers to probe the intergalactic medium and study exotic aspects of the Universe, the rapid discovery of FRBs has recently deemed the track of new events challenging. FRBSTATS provides a user-friendly web interface to an open-access catalogue of FRBs published up to date, along with a 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 parameters and their distributions, for a variety of visualizations. These features allow researchers to conduct population studies and comparisons with astrophysical models, describing the origin and emission mechanism behind these sources. So far, the redshift estimates of 806 bursts have been computed and derived, providing the first public database that includes redshift entries for nearly all observed FRBs. 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. In this work, we present the structure of the platform, the established version control system, as well as the strategy for maintaining such an open database up to date. Additionally, we introduce a novel, computationally-efficient, clustering-based approach that enables unsupervised classification of hundreds of bursts into repeaters and non-repeaters, resulting in the discovery of three new FRB repeaters.
