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.

An excess of massive stars in the local 30 Doradus starburst.

The 30 Doradus star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud is a nearby analog of large star-formation events in the distant universe. We determined the recent formation history and the initial mass function (IMF) of massive stars in 30 Doradus on the basis of spectroscopic observations of 247 stars more massive than 15 solar masses ([Formula: see text]). The main episode of massive star formation began about 8 million years (My) ago, and the star-formation rate seems to have declined in the last 1 My.