The world continues in its pandemic holding pattern, but we are excited to announce the upcoming FRB2021 conference, to be held online from 28th July to 5th August 2021. Meanwhile, once again, here's our round up of recent papers and news items on fast radio bursts, including a flurry of activity related to the repeating FRB 20201124A. We hope our readers continue to stay safe and healthy. Following reader feedback, we also note the change in the number of reported FRBs, repeaters, and host galaxies since the last newsletter issue.

Observational Results

• Enhanced X-ray Emission Coinciding with Giant Radio Pulses from the Crab Pulsar; Teruaki Enoto et al., arXiv: 2104.03492
• Multi-wavelength Follow-up of FRB 180309; Aggarwal et al., arXiv: 2104.03991
• A New Measurement of the Hubble Constant Using Fast Radio Bursts; Hagstotz, Reischke & Lilow, arXiv: 2104.04538
• Constraining Bright Optical Counterparts of Fast Radio Bursts; Nuñez et al., arXiv: 2104.09727

Theory and Modeling

• Linear Anisotropies in Dispersion-Measure-Based Cosmological Observables; D. Alonso, arXiv: 2103.14016
• Bounding the Photon Mass with Cosmological Propagation of Fast Radio Bursts; Huimei Wang, Xueli Miao, Lijing Shao, arXiv: 2103.15299
• Fast Radio Bursts and Their High-energy Counterpart from Magnetar Magnetospheres; Yuan-Pei Yang, Bing Zhang, arXiv: 2104.01925
• Survival Times of Supramassive Neutron Stars Resulting from Binary Neutron Star Mergers; Paz Beniamini, Wenbin Lu, arXiv: 2104.01181
• Radiation by the Superluminally Moving Current Sheet in the Magnetosphere of a Neutron Star; Houshang Ardavan, arXiv: 2104.06126
• Spectral-temporal features of repeating ( one-off ) FRBs and Axion Star; Aiichi Iwazaki, arXiv: 2104.11389
• Statistical properties of fast radio bursts elucidate their origins: magnetars are favoured over gamma-ray bursts; Xiang-Han Cui et al., arXiv: 2104.11617

Algorithms and Instrumentation

• A Real-Time Detection Pipeline for Transient Sources in Radio Images using Convolutional Neural Networks; Ruhe et al., arXiv: 2103.15418
• A Southern-Hemisphere all-sky radio transient monitor for SKA-Low prototype stations; Sokolowski et al., arXiv: 2104.02940
• Robust Assessment of Clustering Methods for Fast Radio Transient Candidates; Aggarwal et al., arXiv: 2104.07046

Other papers of interest

• Black Swans in Astronomical Data; Kipping, arXiv: 2104.07693

A burst of activity surrounding a new repeating FRB:

• A highly active new repeating FRB source was reported by the CHIME/FRB collaboration (FRB 20201124A; ATel 14497), and bursts from the source were subsequently detected by ASKAP (ATels 14502, 14508 and 14509), by FAST (ATel 14518), and even by the 25-m Stockert Radio Telescope (ATel 14556). Non-detections were reported by the DSN (ATel 14519) and Effelsberg (ATel 14537).
• The brighter ASKAP burst led to a localization (ATel 14515) and the identification of a host galaxy (SDSS J050803.48+260338.0; ATel 14516) at a redshift of z=0.098. The source was also localized at the VLA (ATel 14526) and the uGMRT (ATel 14538). The latter localizations agree with each other and place the source in the center of the host galaxy, in some tension with the ASKAP position on the outskirts of the host, 3.3 arcsec away.
• A persistent radio source was identified at the FRB position in observations with the uGMRT at 550-750 MHz (ATel 14529) and the VLA at 3 and 9 GHz (ATel 14549).
• Non-detections were reported at X-ray, UV, and optical bands from observations with Swift/XRT and UVOT (ATel 14523) and the MASTER telescope network (ATel 14532).

FRB2021: The conference FRB2021 will happen online from July 28th to August 5th (with a break in the middle; this date range is based on UT). The conference will be free of charge!

• Please save the dates: see a PDF overview of the block programme and a zipfile of calendar appointments here.
• Please register and submit abstracts via this form.
• Note the deadline for abstracts: May 28th, 2021. Registration without a talk/poster is available till July 16th, 2021.

The Sixteenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting: MG16 will be held in virtual format 5-9 July 2021. There will be a session on FRBs titled "What can we learn from a growing sample of Fast Radio Bursts?" (Co-chairs V. Kaspi, D. Lorimer, B. Zhang).

• Registration deadline May 15; abstract submission deadline June 15.
• Registration available at the conference website.