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2,500 light years from Earth, a “Christmas tree” floats in space. Many orders of magnitude larger than any tree on our planet, this one is made up of young stars that are estimated to be between 1 to 5 million years old.
NASA released a new image of the Christmas Tree Cluster (which it first revealed last year) to the public for Christmas.
Known officially as NGC 2264, the tree-shaped glow is generated by the thousands of young suns that make up the cluster. Data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a space telescope that captures x-ray emissions, was combined with optical data provided by astrophotographer Michael Clow to form the final image.
And a ‘wreath’ of stars...
This year NASA’s Chandra Observatory also shared a new Yuletide wonder... a beautiful ‘wreath’ made of stars and gas! Like the Christmas Tree cluster, this one is also made up of young stars. It is more prosaically known as NGC 602.
According to NASA:
The star cluster NGC 602 lies on the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in NGC 602 have fewer heavier elements compared to the Sun and most of the rest of the galaxy. Instead, the conditions within NGC 602 mimic those for stars found billions of years ago when the universe was much younger.
The ‘wreath’ image combines data from both the Chandra Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope.
Cosmic newborns
Though millions of years old, the stars in both clusters are practically newborns in cosmic terms. They make a perfect symbol of Christmas, the day when the Creator everything in our unimaginably immense universe entered this world as a helpless baby.
