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Title: Do FRBs form inside neutron-star magnetospheres or in outer shocks?
Plain: The radio flash could be made close to the neutron star, inside its cloud of magnetic field and plasma (the magnetosphere), or far out where an ejected shell hits surrounding gas.
Precise: Decide between emission at $r < \sim 1e10\,\mathrm{cm}$ inside a magnetosphere (coherent curvature or plasma emission) and emission at $r \sim 1e13\ \text{to}\ 1e15\,\mathrm{cm}$ by synchrotron maser emission at a relativistic magnetized shock. Discriminants: emission-region size from scintillation, polarization-angle swings within bursts, microsecond structure and spectral bandwidth. Answer: the site for each burst subclass, with the evidence.
Settled by: Scintillation-based size limits and polarization-angle measurements on a sample of repeaters and one-off bursts, compared with the predictions of both models.
Kind: well-posed
Answer type: classification
References: (empty)
Literature status: partially-resolved
Status note: 2025: scintillation of FRB 20221022A limited its emission region to below about $3e9\,\mathrm{cm}$, and a pulsar-like polarization-angle swing of about 130 degrees was found in the same burst, favoring a magnetospheric origin for that event; whether this holds for other bursts is open.
Posed since: (empty)