Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most tantalizing mysteries of the radio sky; their progenitors and origins remain unknown and until now no rapid multiwavelength follow-up of an FRB has been possible. New instrumentation has decreased the time
between observation and discovery from years to seconds, and enables polarimetry to be performed on FRBs for the first time. We have discovered an FRB (FRB 140514) in real-time on 14 May, 2014 at 17:14:11.06 UTC at the Parkes radio telescope and triggered follow-up at other wavelengths within hours of the event. FRB 140514 was found with a dispersion measure (DM) of 562.7(6) cm$^{-3}$ pc, giving an upper limit on source redshift of $z lesssim 0.5$. FRB 140514 was found to be 21$pm$7% (3-$sigma$) circularly polarized on the leading edge with a 1-$sigma$ upper limit on linear polarization $<10%$. We conclude that this polarization is intrinsic to the FRB. If there was any intrinsic linear polarization, as might be expected from coherent emission, then it may have been depolarized by Faraday rotation caused by passing through strong magnetic fields and/or high density environments. FRB 140514 was discovered during a campaign to re-observe known FRB fields, and lies close to a previous discovery, FRB 110220; based on the difference in DMs of these bursts and time-on-sky arguments, we attribute the proximity to sampling bias and conclude that they are distinct objects. Follow-up conducted by 12 telescopes observing from X-ray to radio wavelengths was unable to identify a variable multiwavelength counterpart, allowing us to rule out models in which FRBs originate from nearby ($z < 0.3$) supernovae and long duration gamma-ray bursts.
Using the 100-m Effelsberg radio telescope operating at 1.36 GHz, we have performed a targeted radio pulsar survey of 289 unassociated gamma-ray sources discovered by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) aboard the Fermi satellite and published in the 1FGL
catalogue (Abdo et al., 2010). This survey resulted in the discovery of millisecond pulsar J1745+1017, which resides in a short-period binary system with a low-mass companion, Mmin ~ 0.0137 Msun, indicative of `Black Widow type systems. A two-year timing campaign has produced a refined radio ephemeris, accurate enough to allow for phase-folding of the LAT photons, resulting in the detection of a dual-peaked gamma-ray light-curve, proving that PSR J1745+1017 is the source responsible for the gamma-ray emission seen in 1FGL J1745.5 + 1018 (2FGL J1745.6+1015; Nolan et al., 2012). We find the gamma-ray spectrum of PSR J1745+1017 to be well modelled by an exponentially-cut-off power law with cut-off energy 3.2 GeV and photon index 1.6. The observed sources are known to contain a further 10 newly discovered pulsars which were undetected in this survey. Our radio observations of these sources are discussed and in all cases limiting flux densities are calculated. The reasons behind the seemingly low yield of discoveries are also discussed.
