Revealing the inner guts of LIRGs

Using AO assisted NIR imaging from VLT, this paper investigates super star clusters and obscured core collapse supernovae in these local dusty starbursts. These data are combined with HST optical imaging and SALT and AAT spectroscopy to get kinematics information as well as high spatial resolution for these sytems. Details are sparse in this paper (likely because it appears to be a conference proceeding) about the selection of these LIRGS, data reduction, etc. But two very interesting cases are presented: 1. a third merger component (two were observed optically, but the "head" of the "bird" was not previously seen-- see attached image.) where the obscured "head" appears to have the strongest SFR of the three merging galaxies,

2. a leading arm spiral galaxy (evidence of a retrograde encounter with between two galaxies). The main conclusion from this paper appears to be that NIR AO-assisted observations are important for picking out important phenomena such as obscured supernovae and star-forming clusters. Wouldn't it be lovely if we all had access to those wonderful AO-equipped NIR facilities? However, it has been one of my interests to carry out K-band IFU observations of LIRGS (but most are too large to fit in the tiny fields-of-view of IFUs.) Maybe someday...