(WJET/WFXP) — a space event spreading some holiday cheer in the stars that looks like a Christmas tree.
NASA said the telescope Captured image of NGC 2264It is a collection of young stars between one and five million years old.
NGC 2264 — also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster” because it looks like a cosmic tree with strings of twinkling lights — can be found in the Milky Way, about 2,500 light-years from Earth.
According to NASA, the stars in NGC 2264 are both smaller and more massive than the Sun.
The image below shows the cluster upwards, rotated about 160 degrees from astronomer's standard north. This places the apex of the conical tree near the top.
As for the green gas in the cluster, NASA said it represents the “pine needles” of a tree.
In the video player above, you can see newly formed stars in clusters that look like twinkling Christmas lights.
Those new stars are “turbulent and will cause strong flares as they are captured by X-rays and other types of variations seen through different types of light,” NASA said.
The “flashing lights” in the video were artificially created to emphasize the locations of stars seen in NASA's X-rays. The stars are not aligned in real life.
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