HI absorption in MHONGOOSE -- Spin temperatures and cold neutral medium in nearby disk galaxies

Original Abstract

Combined HI emission-absorption studies constrain the spin temperature and phase structure of the neutral atomic hydrogen interstellar medium (ISM), but have largely been limited to the Milky Way and the Local Group. We extend this technique to galaxies at distances of 7-22 Mpc using deep data from the MeerKAT HI Observations of Nearby Galactic Objects - Observing Southern Emitters (MHONGOOSE) survey, and quantify the detection fraction and Cold Neutral Medium (CNM) properties at these distances. We search for HI absorption toward 56 background continuum sources in 21 out of the 30 MHONGOOSE galaxies (with nine galaxies lacking suitable background sources), and detect absorption associated with the galaxies' HI disks in three cases: one sight line in NGC 289 and two in NGC 7424. This corresponds to detection rates of 3/56 (5 percent) for the full sample and 3/31 (10 percent) for a clean sub-sample of sight lines, considering only unresolved background sources behind 14 low-inclination galaxies. Detections occur only where both the continuum flux and the foreground \HI column density are high, with optical-depth sensitivity as the primary limiting factor. For the detected sight lines, we model the absorption and emission spectra to derive spin temperatures and CNM fractions using the standard combined emission-absorption method. The CNM spin temperatures and line widths are comparable to Local Group measurements, but the inferred CNM fractions are systematically lower. We argue that this difference is primarily a resolution effect: at the distances of our galaxies, the emission spectra average over several hundred parsecs, diluting structured CNM relative to the smoother Warm Neutral Medium (WNM). This demonstrates that emission-absorption analyses can be extended beyond the Local Group, provided that care is taken in constructing representative emission spectra.