Rotating radio transient

Rotating radio transients (RRATs) are sources of short, moderately bright, radio pulses, which were first discovered in 2006.^[1] 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^[update] over 100 have been reported.^[2]