2025-05-27 –, Main Conference Room
FEEDBACK was a legacy program conducted with SOFIA, targeting 11 high-mass star-forming regions through observations of the [CII] 158 μm and [OI] 63 μm emission lines. Here, we highlight key findings from the FEEDBACK survey, with a focus on ongoing and future projects.
Spectrally resolved [CII] observations of HII region bubbles confirmed the detection of fast-expanding (v>10 km/s) [CII] shells driven by stellar winds (e.g., Luisi et al. 2021). More recently, we identified a slowly expanding (v<3 km/s) [CII] shell and a ring, respectively, associated with both the earliest (Keilmann et al. 2025) and terminal (Dannhauer et al., in prep) evolutionary stages of [CII] bubbles. Current work is focused on establishing an evolutionary sequence of [CII] bubbles, exploring their dependence on environmental properties, and investigating the physical processes driving their expansion.
We will also demonstrate the usefulness of the CII line to trace CO-dark, large-scale colliding flows of atomic and molecular gas that built up molecular clouds (Schneider et al. 2023).
We propose new projects aimed at addressing critical questions, including:
- Determining the factors that govern whether a molecular cloud is dispersed or new star formation is triggered.
- Developing sophisticated models of photo-dissociated gas using additional, unpublished SOFIA data, including high-J CO transitions and the CI 1–0 lines.
- Assessing the heating efficiency of gas traced by the [CII] and [OI] lines to test theoretical models of gas heating mechanisms.
To support these efforts, the newly established SOFIA Data Center in Stuttgart, which we present shortly, will provide high-quality data products from most SOFIA instruments.
