CosmoCoffee

Apart from hilarious title this piece of work seems to be quite clever: if galaxy is too faint to be detected alone there should still be SN Ias going off every now and then and therefore seeing a lone SN would indicate either a lone star (well a binary system) or a very faint galaxy. By not detecting anything the authors conclude that LSB galaxies are negligible so everything is good and dandy.

Could we find any loopholes in their argument? I think it would be interesting to repeat this in clusters of galaxies (deeper and narrower) to look for lone stars/LSBs in there...

I have given a quick look at this very interesting paper, indeed the strategy seems to be very smart for tracking the LSBG, however I wonder whether their actual results are limited by selection effects due to the experimental sensitivity. After all when they look for known SNe Ia that should be present in their dataset, they found none, there is only one SNIa candidate during the period of time the data have been collected, which resulted to be too faint for being detected in their survey. Can it be that most of the SNe Ia in LSBG are fainter than ROTSE telescope sensitivity?

Perhaps they have accounted for this in their final estimate and I have just missed that point.

Some time ago P. Padoan, R. Jimenez and myself published a paper where we tried to make synthetic pop. models of LSB (ApJ 481, L27, 1997). We found that models with a single episode of stellar formation, of very low activity and happening very early, could quite well describe the observed B vs. B-V diagrams for LSBs. I wonder how many SNs could be produced under these conditions, also taking into account the fact that often the surface density of the stellar discs of LSBs is lower than for "normal" disc galaxies. Probably very few.