New insights into the dusty hearts of local U/LIRGs – Yiqing Song

Gas-rich galaxy mergers represent a crucial phase in the evolution of massive galaxies, where the host galaxy and the supermassive blackhole are thought to grow rapidly in tandem. Local IR-luminous galaxies provide the ideal laboratories to study in detail the extreme starburst and AGN activity triggered by such processes. However, heavy non-uniform dust extinction ubiquitously present in these systems makes this task challenging and necessitates a mulit-wavelength approach. In this talk, I will give an overview of recent efforts to characterize the nature of dust-obscured nuclei in local LIRGs and the associated feedback, in particular highlighting new results from high-resolution VLA and JWST studies from the Great Observatories All-sky LIRG Survey.