ESO La Silla observes Lives and deaths of sibling stars

In this image from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile young stars huddle together against a backdrop of clouds of glowing gas and lanes of dust. 

The star cluster, known as NGC 3293, would have been just a cloud of gas and dust itself about ten million years ago, but as stars began to form it became the bright group we see here. 

Clusters like this are celestial laboratories that allow astronomers to learn more about how stars evolve. 

Credit: ESO/G. Beccari

This beautiful star cluster, NGC 3293, is found 8000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina (The Keel).

This cluster was first spotted by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille in 1751, during his stay in what is now South Africa, using a tiny telescope with an aperture of just 12 millimetres.

It is one of the brightest clusters in the southern sky and can be easily seen with the naked eye on a dark clear night.

Star clusters like NGC 3293 contain stars that all formed at the same time, at the same distance from Earth and out of the same cloud of gas and dust, giving them the same chemical composition.

As a result clusters like this are ideal objects for testing stellar evolution theory.

Most of the stars seen here are very young, and the cluster itself is less than 10 million years old. Just babies on cosmic scales if you consider that the Sun is 4.6 billion years old and still only middle-aged.

An abundance of these bright, blue, youthful stars is common in open clusters like NGC 3293, and, for example, in the better known Kappa Crucis cluster, otherwise known as the Jewel Box (NGC 4755).

These open clusters each formed from a giant cloud of molecular gas and their stars are held together by their mutual gravitational attraction but these forces are not enough to hold a cluster together against close encounters with other clusters and clouds of gas as the cluster's own gas and dust dissipates.

So, open clusters will only last a few hundred million years, unlike their big cousins, the globular clusters, which can survive for billions of years, and hold on to far more stars.

Despite some evidence suggesting that there is still some ongoing star formation in NGC 3293, it is thought that most, if not all, of the nearly fifty stars in this cluster were born in one single event but even though these stars are all the same age, they do not all have the dazzling appearance of a star in its infancy; some of them look positively elderly, giving astronomers the chance to explore how and why stars evolve at different speeds.

Take the bright orange star at the bottom right of the cluster. This huge star, a red giant, would have been born as one of the biggest and most luminous of its litter, but bright stars burn out fast.

As the star used up the fuel at its core its internal dynamics changed and it began to swell and cool, becoming the red giant we now observe.

Red giants are reaching the end of their life cycle, but this red giant's sister stars are still in what is known as the pre-main-sequence, the period before the long, stable, middle period in a star's life.

We see these stars in the prime of their life as hot, bright and white against the red and dusty background.

Arsenal DARPA Foam: Saving Wounded Soldiers

Researchers working on a foam designed to limit internal bleeding of soldiers injured on the battlefield have received $15.5m (£9.6m) from the US military to continue their work.

The foam is formed by two liquids, injected into the body, which mix, expand and harden to create an internal dressing.

Arsenal Medical's product is funded by the Pentagon's Darpa research unit.

One UK surgeon said it could help those far away from a medical facility but the technology is still in early pre-clinical stages. It has already been tested on pigs but not humans.

The firm hopes that the polyurethane polymer foam will help control internal bleeding for at least an hour, increasing the survival chances of troops wounded on the battlefield.

Polyurethane foams are already widely used inside the metal and plastic walls of refrigerators or for thermal insulation.

Brian Holloway - DARPA

Once a wounded soldier is transferred to receive proper medical attention, the foam can be easily removed in minutes in a solid block.

According to the pre-clinical data presented at the 2012 annual meeting of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma (AAST) in Kauai, Hawaii, the foam raised survival rates for liver injuries after three hours from 8% to 72%, and reduced blood loss sixfold.

"If testing bears out, the foam technology could affect up to 50% of potentially survivable battlefield wounds," said Brian Holloway of Darpa.

Dangerous haemorrhage
Abdominal injuries were especially dangerous, said Dr Michael Walsh, a surgeon at the Royal London Hospital, because traditional methods of stopping blood loss such as compression pads or tourniquets could not be applied.

"Currently for internal bleeding in the abdomen and chest there is nothing that is done pre-hospital to stop the bleeding," he said.

"The best policy currently is for the pre-hospital team to recognise the potential for internal bleeding and to transfer the patient to one of our now designated major trauma centres for rapid assessment and early surgery to stop the bleeding."

He said that the foam technology could be useful to control haemorrhages when a patient was far from a medical facility, or in the case of multiple injuries with competing priorities for treatment.

For example, a severe head injury could be treated once major internal bleeding in the abdomen had been stabilised but, he added, that more research was needed to "demonstrate the safety and efficacy of this product over and above current standards of care for internal bleeding".

Staff would also have to be trained to administer it properly but shows great promise.

The device still needs to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

Space Balloon Launch Disaster - Lives in Danger

The launch of a giant space balloon went terribly wrong Thursday in the Australian Outback when a heavy payload of scientific equipment broke from its mooring and dragged across the desert, slamming into a vehicle and narrowly missing bystanders.

One witness said she felt lucky to be alive after the car-sized, unmanned gondola hanging beneath the balloon careened out-of-control into the vehicle parked next to hers at the launch site near Alice Springs, in central Australia.

As the huge balloon filled with air, the bundle of equipment was ripped from its mounting and dragged across the desert, crashing into and upturning a parked four-wheel-drive vehicle and strewing debris across a wide area before coming to a halt.

No one was injured in the incident, which was captured on video by an Australian Broadcasting Corp. television film crew.