Stellar Feedback in the ISM Revealed by Wide-Field Far-Infrared
  Spectral-Imaging
  The radiative and mechanical interaction of stars with their environment
drives the evolution of the ISM and of galaxies as a whole. The far-IR emission
(lambda ~30 to 350 microns) from atoms and molecules dominates the cooling of
the warm gas in the neutral ISM, the material that ultimately forms stars.
Far-IR lines are thus the most sensitive probes of stellar feedback processes,
and allow us to quantify the deposition and cycling of energy in the ISM. While
ALMA (in the (sub)mm) and JWST (in the IR) provide astonishing sub-arcsecond
resolution images of point sources and their immediate environment, they cannot
access the main interstellar gas coolants, nor are they designed to image
entire star-forming regions (SFRs). Herschel far-IR photometric images of the
interstellar dust thermal emission revealed the ubiquitous large-scale
filamentary structure of SFRs, their mass content, and the location of
thousands of prestellar cores and protostars. These images, however, provide a
static view of the ISM: not only they dont constrain the cloud dynamics,
moreover they cannot reveal the chemical composition and energy transfer within
the cloud, thus giving little insight into the regulation process of star
formation by stellar feedback. In this white paper we emphasize the need of a
space telescope with wide-field spectral-imaging capabilities in the critical
far-IR domain.
