[CII] line emission towards a sample of galaxies

[CII] is the main coolant over a wide density range in the interstellar medium. As a result it is expected that the total [CII] emission is correlated to the local star formation activity which was confirmed for a relatively large sample of galaxies. However, starburst galaxies show a lower [CII] emission than expected. It is thus important to understand the relation of [CII] emission with the SFR, cooling, extinction and molecular gas.

The DDT program 76_0007 observed 11 galaxies with FIFI-LS from the EDGE-CALIFA survey which provides complementary optical IFU spectroscopy and high-resolution CO data from CARMA for a large sample of nearby galaxies ( Bolatto et al. 2017 ). The FIFI-LS observations aimed to make galaxy maps at the poorly-studied transition range from 'normal' disk galaxies to 'starburst' galaxies to examine both [CII] and [OI] emission.

The full dataset of the 11 galaxies (NGC 5218, NGC 5908, NGC 5930, NGC 5980, NGC 6155, NGC 6168, NGC 6361, NGC 6478, UGC 05108, UGC 05111 and UGC 10205) can be found at the SOFIA science archive under plan ID '76_0007' or by following this link .

The [CII] integrated intensity, observed with FIFI-LS, overlaid with contours indicating the integrated CO emission, observed with CARMA, towards NGC 5218 (left) and NGC 5930 (right).