The Core-Collapse Supernova Rate in Arp299 Revisited
  We present a study of the CCSN rate in nuclei A and B1 of the luminous
infrared galaxy Arp299, based on 11 years of Very Large Array monitoring of
their radio emission at 8.4 GHz. Significant variations in the nuclear radio
flux density can be used to identify the CCSN activity in the absence of
high-resolution very long baseline interferometry observations. In the case of
the B1-nucleus, the small variations in its measured diffuse radio emission are
below the fluxes expected from radio supernovae, thus making it well-suited to
detect RSNe through flux density variability. In fact, we find strong evidence
for at least three RSNe this way, which results in a lower limit for the CCSN
rate of 0.28 +/- 0.16 per year. In the A-nucleus, we did not detect any
significant variability and found a SN detection threshold luminosity which
allows only the detection of the most luminous RSNe known. Our method is
basically blind to normal CCSN explosions occurring within the A-nucleus, which
result in too small variations in the nuclear flux density, remaining diluted
by the strong diffuse emission of the nucleus itself. Additionally, we have
attempted to find near-infrared counterparts for the earlier reported RSNe in
the Arp299 nucleus A, by comparing NIR adaptive optics images from the Gemini-N
telescope with contemporaneous observations from the European VLBI Network.
However, we were not able to detect NIR counterparts for the reported radio SNe
within the innermost regions of nucleus A. While our NIR observations were
sensitive to typical CCSNe at 300 mas from the centre of the nucleus A,
suffering from extinction up to A_v~15 mag, they were not sensitive to such
highly obscured SNe within the innermost nuclear regions where most of the EVN
sources were detected. (abridged)
