This “Christmas tree” from space is actually a young cluster of newborn stars: how the image was obtained

This spectacular “Christmas” image published by NASA of the star cluster NGC 2264also known as Christmas Tree Cluster (Christmas Tree Cluster), shows a young star cluster a 2500 light years from us which recalls the shape of a Christmas tree, actually composed of the young girl’s material “star cradle” illuminated by the energetic radiation of newborn stars. In fact, these are stars of very young age (between 1 and 5 million years, a blink of an eye from an astronomical point of view) and sizes ranging from very small stars (one tenth of the mass of the Sun) up to “beasts” even of 7 solar masses.

Let’s say right away that the image of this star formation region is not actually green like a Christmas tree: it is in fact an image composed of data collected by different telescopes and is made in false colorsalso because wavelengths not visible to the human eye are also used.

The lights of the Christmas tree, i.e. the blue and white dots in the tree, are ai images X-rays collected by the space telescope Chandra of NASA. Being very energetic radiation, these are images of the most massive and therefore hottest stars in the star cluster.

There green partwhich actually resembles the shape of a Christmas fir along our line of sight, is the gas present in the cluster. This portion of the image was obtained in visible light from the US telescope WIYN of the National Science Foundation.

The other starsout of the cluster or in the foreground, have been immortalized in infrared band from the Two Micron All Sky Survey telescopes and were released in white.

NASA also released one “animated” version of this image that you can observe here, in which the lights of the tree seem to “flash”. This is not a purely aesthetic thing but is artificially created (in the sense that the stars do not appear and disappear in such an obvious or synchronized way) to reflect the real variations in brightness observed by Chandra for the stars of this cluster. These variations are due to stellar flares and other instabilities due to the very young age of these stars.