Seminar
The Scutum-Crux Complex: Tying massive stellar formation with the overall structure of the Milky Way

Abstract

With the discovery of several massive, young clusters in the last five years, the area around the base of the Scutum-Crux arm (around l=28) has become one of the more intense stellar formation areas in the whole Galaxy. This is not totally unexpected, as it is just there where it was predicted that the long bar of the Milky Way would come into contact with the disk, triggering stellar formation. With this talk we review all these evidences and we bring others into light, as we try to obtain a clearer picture of what is happening in these areas and what does it tell us about the inner structure of the Galaxy, particularly of the bulge+bar complex.