Abstract
The possibility that the dusty torus of AGN unified schemes is connected with star formation activity has been raised by many authors. Some or all of the nuclear obscuration might originate in clouds ejected from a starburst (e.g. Watabe & Umemura 2005), which could also provide the energy necessary to maintain the thickness of the torus. Star formation is quite commonly observed in AGN on few hundred pc scales, but the mid-IR emitting regions of the torus are much smaller, perhaps only a few pc across. The recent detection of a 10^6 M_odot, 10^6 yr-old stellar cluster < 9 pc from the nucleus of the nearby LINER/Sy1 galaxy, NGC1097 (Storchi-Bergmann et al. 2005) may therefore be a rare example of a starburst physically associated with an AGN torus.
