Exploring γ-Ray Flares from High-Redshift Blazar B3 1343+451 at GeV Energies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a very interesting paper albeit somewhat limited in scope. The material it does cover is covered thoroughly and in a scientifically sound manner. I recommend it be published.

The paper is a longitudinal study of flares from a particular high redshift blazar. The researchers study the temporal and spectral variational properties of the blazar. The analysis is very thorough and helps the reader understand this blazar in detail. By analyzing the flares the authors can verify the fact that the flares come from different emission regions in addition to categorizing the flares almost completely. Their work definitely adds to our understanding of the properties of flares from a blazar.

My only suggestion is to check further for typos or abbreviations including standard ones that have not been defined. 

Author Response

\end{center}
Dear referee,
   We sincerely thank you for carefully reading our manuscript and providing the
valuable suggestions that help us improve the manuscript. Based on the referee's suggestions,
we have revised our manuscript, including the language and language logic of the whole paper. We have also carefully
checked both spelling and grammar errors of the whole paper following your suggestions. We also added the discussion of the results from Wu et al and some statements about fitting of the 1-day and 2-day binned light curves.

Best regard,
All authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper is a very good analysis of high energy data for B3 1343+451.  I do have a few requests for minor modifications.

1.       Some figures, especially Fig. 1, are too small to read.  Is there some way to make them larger?

2.      While you mention that the source of variability may be caused by “disturbances caused by dense plasma blobs passing through the standing shock front in the jet region”, and maybe even expand on this, you should also mention or discuss another possibility, namely a jet moving within and out of the line of sight of observation.  You may be right that it is dominated by such aforementioned disturbances, but for completion, especially for blazars, jet kinematics should also be considered.

 

I find a major oversight is the lack of low energy (say, optical or radio) data.  There should be an abundance of optical data since 2015 for this object.  Such data could greatly enhance any studies of correlation across frequencies for these flares.

 

I would not ask you to make any major revisions in this regard, but I would suggest you mention how including optical and radio data could improve the analysis.

 

 

Author Response

Dear referee,

We sincerely thank you for carefully reading our manuscript and providing the
valuable suggestions that help us improve the manuscript. Based on the referee's suggestions,
we have revised our manuscript, including the language and language logic of the whole paper. We have also carefully
checked both spelling and grammar errors of the whole paper following your suggestions. We also added the discussion of the results from Wu et al and some statements about fitting of the 1-day and 2-day binned light curves.\\

1.Some figures, especially Fig. 1, are too small to read. Is there some way to make them larger?\\
\textbf{Reply:\\}
Following your suggestions, in the revised version, we have revised it.

2. While you mention that the source of variability may be caused by ``disturbances caused by dense plasma blobs passing through the standing shock front in the jet region", and maybe even expand on this, you should also mention or discuss another possibility, namely a jet moving within and out of the line of sight of observation. You may be right that it is dominated by such aforementioned disturbances, but for completion, especially for blazars, jet kinematics should also be considered.\\
\textbf{Reply:\\}
Thank you for pointing out this issues, in the revised version, we have revised it as:``\emph{The symmetric temporal profiles observed for the flares from source B3~1343+451 suggest that the rise and decay timescales are dominated by a disturbance from a dense plasma blob passing through the standing shock front in the jet region. However, in order to complete the flares process of blazars, the symmetric temporal profiles may be due to double action from a disturbance from a dense plasma blob passing through the standing shock front in the jet region and a jet moving within and out of the line of sight of observation.}".

3.I find a major oversight is the lack of low energy (say, optical or radio) data. There should be an abundance of optical data since 2015 for this object. Such data could greatly enhance any studies of correlation across frequencies for these flares. I would not ask you to make any major revisions in this regard, but I would suggest you mention how including optical and radio data could improve the analysis.\\
\textbf{Reply:\\}
Thank you for pointing out this issues, in the revised version, we have added some statements with optical and radio data to improve the analysis:``Here, we didn't analyze the Cross Correlation between optical,radio and $\gamma$-ray. Some researches elaborate that observed radio/$\gamma$-ray correlations can be attributed to jet components that are being newly ejected from the central engine and a quadratic dependence of the amplitude of the $\gamma$-ray variability with respect to that of the optical favors an SSC explanation."

Best regard,

All authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

It was very difficult to read this paper because of the sometimes obscure English, the use of undefined acronyms and spelling errors. Also, links to the software used are often missing.

In the meantime, a paper very similar to the one proposed has been published:  “Wu et al The Astrophysical Journal, 972:183 (10pp), 2024 September 10 “.

The referee suggests a major revision of the work that includes the comments reported below and a comparison with the work of WU et al.

 

=========================================

I limit myself to listing only some comments because it is too tiring to check the whole article

1) typos :
Line 31 “HE;”, maybe it is HE.
Line 31 VHE;
Line 44 “ISP maybe it is LSP, also the frequency ranges overlap.
Line 61 and 96. “Fermi” is in Italic,
Line 167 “ymmetric” symmetric
Fig 3 CCF perhaps DCF.

2) Undefined acronyms: EW , LSP, IC, MT, BLR… “Thomson regime” “Klein-Nishina” regime….

3) English :
line 49 “ is dominated over “ probably “ by”?
Line 72 “the bulk Lorentz” : what is the bulk Lorentz factor?
Line 135. “ We found that the significant …”   remove “the”
Line 250 “ For the extrinsic causes, the attenuation ..” ?? It is obscure
 Line 259 “For the intrinsic causes,…”. obscure ..

=======================================A few more substantial comments:

Fig 1) this figure is very identical to that of the work of "Wu et al The Astrophysical Journal, 972:183 (10pp), 2024 September 10" .
This work is in many points very similar to the one to be published on Universe. In many points it seems better to me.
I do not see this work in the bibliography. This work should be cited and the text should contain a discussion of the results of the two works.

Line 135 and eq (1) No information is given on the fit  with 2 day and 1 day  data binned and it is not clear why the Bayesian block algorithm to find the peaks, designed specifically for astrophysics problems, was abandoned. Equation (1) is probably used with a chi2 type method. But with the chi2 method it is not  easy to calculate the confidence levels of the peaks; some a priori are not taken into account (for example the number of peaks to find and the search time windows). The parameter errors do not give something similar to the T statistics of the Bayesian block algorithm

Line 180 eq 2. I do not understand equation (2) well, perhaps there is a typographical error. In any case it seems to me that a scanning method was used, which is by nature less precise than a method with a fit as used in Wu (2024).
The errors in table 2 in the tau values ​​are too small.
 I do not understand how one can have errors even lower than 1/10 of a day starting from data with intervals of 1 day.

================================

At this point the referee abstains on the conclusions part because the referee
thinks that a deep revision of this work is necessary, which takes into account, especially in the conclusions, the work of Wu et al. It is for this reason that he makes no observations on the concluding part.

 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Only a few examples:

line 49 “ is dominated over “ probably “ by”?
Line 72 “the bulk Lorentz” : what is the bulk Lorentz factor?
Line 135. “ We found that the significant …”   remove “the”
Line 250 “ For the extrinsic causes, the attenuation ..” ?? It is obscure
 Line 259 “For the intrinsic causes,…”. obscure ..

Author Response

We sincerely thank you for carefully reading our manuscript and providing the
valuable suggestions that help us improve the manuscript. Based on the referee's suggestions,
we have revised our manuscript, including the language and language logic of the whole paper. We also added the discussion of the results from Wu et al and some statements about fitting of the 1-day and 2-day binned light curves.
We have carefully checked both spelling and grammar errors of the whole paper following your suggestions:\\

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

My suggestions were accepted. The paper can be published