by Paolo Serra (ATNF/CASS), Tobias Westmeier (UWA/ICRAR), et al.

Studying HI in galaxies can be challenging in a number of different ways. You’ll need to get your data, remove the ever-annoying RFI, obtain a good calibration and make the HI cubes. At the end of this all you’ll still need to detect the HI – and this can be quite tricky. Well, SoFiA is there to help you!

SoFiA is a flexible source-finder for 3D spectral line data. It can be used on any cube (not just HI), and offers a number of different algorithms to: search for line emission on multiple scales; estimate the reliability of individual detections; look for signal in arbitrarily large cubes using a catalogue of coordinates as a prior; provide a wide range of source parameters and output products. And it comes with a beautiful GUI, too!

SoFiA is described in Serra et al. (2015, MNRAS , in press – arXiv:1501.03906 ) and is registered at the Astrophysics Source Code Library with ID ascl:1412.001 . You can download SoFiA here .