Response to Comment on "An excess of massive stars in the local 30 Doradus starburst"

Farr and Mandel reanalyze our data, finding initial mass function slopes for high-mass stars in 30 Doradus that agree with our results. However, their reanalysis appears to underpredict the observed number of massive stars. Their technique results in more precise slopes than in our work, strengthening our conclusion that there is an excess of massive stars ( 30 solar masses) in 30 Doradus. Farr and Mandel (1) reanalyzed the results of our study (2), in which we investigated the star formation history (SFH) and stellar initial mass function (IMF) of the local 30 Doradus (30 Dor) starburst in the Large Magellanic Cloud and found an overabundance of stars with initial mass exceeding 30 solar masses (M). They use an alternative and potentially more powerful statistical framework, hierarchical Bayesian inference, and infer IMF power-law indices for massive stars that are in agreement with our results (compare the IMF slope distributions in their figure 1 to the 1σ range inferred in our analysis).