NASA has revealed new images of a distant nebula located 2,500 light years from Earth that bears a strong resemblance to a decorated Christmas tree.
The agency created a new composite image of the nebula known as NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” using the National Science Foundation’s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The image was rotated 160 degrees to give the resemblance of a Christmas tree. Its colors were also altered.
“Optical data is represented by wispy green lines and shapes, which creates the boughs and needles of the tree shape,” said NASA on its website. “X-rays detected by Chandra are presented as blue and white lights and resemble glowing dots of light on the tree. Infrared data show foreground and background stars as gleaming specks of white against the blackness of space.”
NASA also animated the tree’s image, causing Chandra’s blue and white X-ray dots to “flicker and twinkle on the tree, like the lights on a Christmas tree.”
The “coordinated, blinking variations” shown in the animation are “artificial, to emphasize the locations of the stars seen in X-rays and highlight the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree. In reality, the variations of the stars are not synchronized.”
NASA produced a static image as well as an animated one, describing the composite image of young stars as appearing “like a cosmic Christmas tree.”
Stars in the nebula range in size and mass from a tenth of the mass of the sun to seven times its mass.
