The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has released an image of a cosmic Christmas tree as the holiday season approaches.
The image is of NGC 2264, a young star cluster also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster.”
The new composite image, released just days before Christmas, resembles a Christmas tree, but this is due to “color and rotation choices.”
There’s also a Christmas-themed, blinking-light version of the image. According to NASA, the blinking blue and white lights are “young stars that give off X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray.”.
Cosmic Christmas tree: The cluster of young stars, NGC 2264, has stars aged one to five million years
The green color of the “pine needles” in the cosmic images corresponds to gas in the nebula. The optical data came from the National Science Foundation‘s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak. The twinkling foreground and background stars in white are from the Two Micron All Sky Survey’s infrared data.
“This image has been rotated clockwise by about 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upward, so that it appears like the top of the tree is toward the top of the image,” adds NASA.
According to NASA, the cluster of young stars, NGC 2264, has stars aged one to five million years and is our planet’s cosmic neighbor—located in our Milky Way galaxy, about 2,500 light years away from Earth.
According to the space agency, the stars in NGC 2264 vary in size. Some are smaller than our Sun, while others are much larger. Their sizes range from less than a tenth of the mass of the Sun to seven times the mass of the Sun.