Do people about 2,500 light years away celebrate Christmas?
Well if they do, they certainly know how to do it in style.
NASA has released a new image of NGC 2264, also known as the ‘Christmas Tree Cluster’, an area of space complete with sparkling baubles and pine tree needles.
Astronomers coloured the smoky gas around the bunch of spritely stars aged between one to five million years old green – because, you know, Christmas.
Captured by the Chandra Observatory telescope, the cluster is 2,500 light years away in our own Milky Way Galaxy.
If that doesn’t sound like much, that’s about 14.7 quadrillion miles away (that’s 15 zeros by the way), or give or take 294,000,000,000,000,000 football pitches away.
‘It’s beginning to look like cosmos,’ NASA posted on X as it shared the composite image.
Young stars, just like children back down here on Earth, go through quite a few mood swings.
They are, according to NASA, ‘volatile’.
What gives the stars in the Christmas Tree Cluster their twinkle are the X-rays they’re giving off, with the US space agency tweaking the photo to show these waves as blue and white lights ‘to emphasise the locations of the stars… and highlight the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree’.
Though, we personally don’t recommend you hang X-rays off your Christmas tree.
Is NASA telling us there’s a giant tree in the middle of space? No, but they are saying they’ve edited the crimson clouds of the nebula the cluster of ornaments is scattered across green to make it look like the branches and needles of a fir.
These clouds are made up of cosmic dust and gas – the kind spat out at millions of miles an hour by supernovas – and hydrogen and helium.
While they don’t sound too cosy to us, these are the stellar nurseries of the cosmos. All this material gets squeezed together like a ball of Play-Doh by gravity into shiny new stars, some larger than the sun.
The Christmas Tree Cluster is also home to hundreds of brown dwarfs, sometimes unceremoniously called ‘failed stars’, that are dim objects too tiny to achieve enough gravity to compress hydrogen to the point of nuclear fusion.
Sadly there’s no big star on top of this Christmas tree – not even literally speaking.
Instead, the top of the cluster after scientists rotated the image by about 150 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upwards is bald.
NGC 2264 is made up of two giant astronomical objects: the not-at-all-figuratively named Cone Nebula and the Christmas Tree Cluster itself.
Sadly, the nearby Snowflake Cluster and the Fox Fur Nebula didn’t make the cut.
NASA has long been known to spread the holiday cheer. In 2018, the agency released a video of the remains of a supernova blast called SNR 0509-67.5.
Not the most memorable name for a stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth.
But the red, almost bauble-shaped ring it left certainly was.
Last month, NASA experts used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to lens the ‘Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster’, a winking gaggle of galaxies smashing into one another about 4,300,000,000 light years away.
Scientists weren’t kidding about the same.
The astronomers said within the winter wonderland of galaxies within MACS0416 are 14 celestial objects, or ‘transients’ as scientists call them, that flicker just like Christmas tree lights.
‘We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colourful and because of these flickering lights we find within it,’ said astronomer Haojing Yan, one of the study authors.
‘We can see transients everywhere.’
We’re guessing, though, that the cosmos’ Christmas card it sent you has been caught up in the post.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
from Tech – Metro https://ift.tt/470dbku
via IFTTT
0 Response for the "‘Christmas Tree Cluster’ of stars wishes the known universe a happy holidays"
Post a Comment