Solving the Mystery of Fast Radio Bursts: A Detective’s Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper can be published in the present form.

Author Response

I thank the referee for reading the paper and recommending the paper for publication. 

Reviewer 2 Report

I only have one major issue and a couple of minor issues with this proceedings.

 

Major issue:

 

The author advocates for a "detective's approach" in the title and Prologue. I wonder if it is not simply a Bayesian approach, with model probabilities being updated as more data is revealed. How does a detective's approach differ from Bayesian reasoning? The proceedings would also be better served if the author can explicitly write in the text how the detective’s philosophy is incorporated in the sections that follow. For example, section 2 is obviously comprised of “clues”.

 

Minor issues/comments:

 

Line 48: discovered -> reported (it was in data from 2001). There is also a 1980 ApJ paper  (Linscott and Erkes).

 

Line 63-64: the mechanisms may be different but the physics could be similar. I would reword it to be more open/cautious.

 

Line 101-102: How firmly ruled out is the claimed 157 day periodicity?

 

Line 123: the youngness is at odds with delay times and stellar offsets

 

Line 137: arXiv:2306.00948 makes the case that claimed link is improbable

 

Line 195: Propagation effects within the magnetosphere can also imprint circular polarization

 

Line 215-217: The shock model proponents would claim the active repeaters are “hyperactive” young magnetars, maybe born from WD+WD mergers and/or there is significant beaming. There are, of course, observational arguments against this and they should be made here (repeater active lifetime, low number of WD mergers).

 

Section 4: The large E-parallel would mandate low-twist conditions

 

Line 266: loose->lose

 

Author Response

I thank the referee for helpful comments. The proceedings paper has been revised accordingly to address all the minor issues/comments. About the major issue, I have thought carefully about the referee's question. My understanding is that the detective's approach can be in principle regarded as Bayesian reasoning if all possible models are considered as priors. In reality, however, people often adopt some a priori priors to begin with and ask how data match those priors. For example, one can assume that the synchrotron maser shock model is correct and use data to fit for model parameters. Such an analysis runs into the risk that the starting assumption (that the synchrotron maser model is correct) is incorrect so that all the derived parameters may become irrelevant. This is different from the detective's approach I was advocating, which focuses on using the data to constrain the possible physical scenarios. In order to avoid confusion, I decided not to mention Bayesian analysis in this short contribution. In any case, I have added one more sentence in Section 2 to show that the second half of the bullet points are the reasoning derived from the clues provided in the first half of the bullet points. 

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a very nice paper reviewing the statue of FRB on where and how
it produced basedn on observation. The paper is well written and I recommend it
to be published in the Universe.

Author Response

I thank the referee for reading the paper and for recommending the paper for publication.