The large-scale environment of low surface brightness galaxies
  The exact formation scenarios and evolutionary processes that led to the
existence of the class of low surface brightness galaxies (LSBs) have not yet
been understood completely. Since the environment of LSBs has been studied
before only on small scales (below 2 Mpc), a study of the galaxy content in the
vicinity of LSB galaxies on larger scales could add a lot to our understanding
of the origin of this galaxy class. We used the spectroscopic main galaxy
sample of the SDSS DR4 to investigate the environmental galaxy density of LSB
galaxies compared to the galaxy density in the vicinity of high surface
brightness galaxies (HSBs). The environment studies, divided into two redshift
bins, show that both the low mass, and the more massive LSBs possess an
environment with a lower galaxy density than HSBs. The differences in the
galaxy density between LSBs and HSBs are significant on scales between 2 and 5
Mpc, the scales of groups and filaments. To quantify this, we have introduced
for the first time the LSB-HSB Antibias. The obtained LSB-HSB Antibias
parameter has a value of 10%-15%. From these results we conclude that LSBs
formed in low-density regions of the initial universe and have drifted until
now to the outer parts of the filaments and walls of the large-scale structure.
Furthermore, our results, together with actual cosmological simulations, show
that LSBs are caused by a mixture of nature and nurture.
