Your: Your Unified Reader
Kshitij Aggarwal, Devansh Agarwal, Joseph Kania, William Fiore, Reshma Thomas, Scott Ransom, Paul Demorest, Robert Wharton, Sarah Burke-Spolaor, Duncan Lorimer, Maura Mclaughlin, Nathaniel Garver-Daniels
Abstract
The understanding of fast radio transients like pulsar single pulses, rotating radio transients (RRATs), and especially Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) has evolved rapidly over the last decade. This is primarily due to dedicated campaigns by sensitive radio telescopes to search for transients. The advancement in signal processing and GPU processing systems has enabled new transient detectors at various telescopes to perform much more sensitive searches than their predecessors due to the ability to find and process FRB candidates in real-time or near-realtime. Typically the data output from the telescopes is in one of the two commonly used formats: psrfits Software developed for transient searches often only works with one of these two formats, limiting their general applicability. Therefore, researchers have to write custom scripts to read/write the data in their format of choice before they can begin any data analysis relevant for their research. This has led to the development of several python libraries to manage one or the other data format (like pysigproc, psrfits, sigpyproc, etc). Still, no general tool exists which can work across data formats.