Main Colloquium
Dr. Kaustubh Rajwade	SCHEDULED

University of Oxford, UK

The discovery of long-period radio transients (LPTs) has opened a new region of parameter space for coherent radio emission, revealing sources with periods of minutes to hours that challenge the traditional divide between pulsars and white-dwarf binaries. In this talk, I will review the rapidly growing phenomenology of these objects, from long-period neutron stars to white-dwarf pulsars and magnetic binaries, how they are discovered and discuss what their radio emission can tell us about the underlying physics. Despite their very different characteristic timescales, many LPTs show striking similarities to pulsars: microstructure in pulses, strong linear and circular polarization, complex position-angle behaviour, narrow-band emission and drifting components, and variability over a hierarchy of timescales. I will highlight recent observations of several LPTs and ask whether these common properties point to universal ingredients in coherent radio emission. I will briefly describe ongoing efforts to reveal this population of LPTs using the LOFAR telescope, which employs state-of-the-art techniques to find them. Ultimately, studying emission from LPTs may provide a new way to trace how coherent radio emission evolves across compact objects, and to determine where radio-emitting neutron stars end and white-dwarf systems begin.