Search for and analysis of IR clouds

RSG1 is an enormously massive cloud in the Milky Way.

LIRIS, the IR imaging camera and spectrograph built by the IAC, is giving life to new projects. During 2006 advances were made in the search for and analysis of IR clouds. RSG1 is shown in Figure 1. It is a cloud with fourteen red supergiants, (indicated in the figure, together with the relative coordinates at the centre of the cloud), implying that the it has a mass of 2-4 x 104 M¤. This would make it one of the most massive clouds in the Milky Way. Figure II shows the cloud ID066. The centre of the cloud can be seen with an extinction zone around it, which could have come from the original molecular cloud. This cloud has been observed spectrographically using LIRIS.

Ref. 2: ID066 (2008, in IAU Symp. 250, "Massive Stars as Cosmic Engines", Hawaii, F. Bresolin, P. Crwother and J. Puls, eds., ASP).

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