Rotating radio transient

Rotating radio transients (RRATs) are sources of short, moderately bright, radio pulses, which were first discovered in 2006. RRATs are thought to be pulsars, i.e. rotating magnetised neutron stars which emit more sporadically and/or with higher pulse-to-pulse variability than the bulk of the known pulsars. The working definition of what a RRAT is, is a pulsar which is more easily discoverable in a search for bright single pulses, as opposed to in Fourier domain searches so that 'RRAT' is little more than a label (of how they are discovered) and does not represent a distinct class of objects from pulsars. As of March 2015 over 100 have been reported.

General characteristics

Pulses from RRATs are short in duration, lasting from a few milliseconds. The pulses are comparable to the brightest single pulses observed from pulsars with flux densities of a few Jansky at 1.4 GHz.Andrew Lyne, a radio astronomer involved in the discovery of RRATs, "guesses that there are only a few dozen brighter radio sources in the sky." The time intervals between detected bursts range from seconds (one pulse period) to hours. Thus radio emission from RRATs is typically only detectable for less than one second per day.