There is – literally – not even a star on the Christmas tree (Photo: AFP/GETTY)

Do people about 2,500 light years away celebrate Christmas?

If so, 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 in space filled with sparkling balls and pine needles.

Astronomers turned the smoky gas around the group of ghostly stars, which were between one and five million years old, green – because it was Christmas.

The cluster, captured by the Chandra Observatory telescope, is located 2,500 light-years away in our own Milky Way.

If that doesn’t sound like much, that’s about 15 trillion miles away (that’s 15 zeros, by the way) or 294,000,000,000,000,000 football fields away.

“It’s starting to look like the cosmos,” NASA posted on X while sharing the composite image.

NASA officials colored the nebula green and rotated the image to look more like a Christmas tree (Photo: AFP)

Young stars, just like children here on Earth, experience some mood swings.

According to NASA, they are ‘volatile’.

What gives the stars in the Christmas tree cluster their sparkle are the X-rays they emit. The US space agency modified the photo to show these waves as blue and white light “to emphasize the locations of the stars… the resemblance of this object to a Christmas tree.”

However, we personally advise against hanging X-rays on the Christmas tree.

Is NASA telling us there’s a giant tree in the middle of space? No, but they say they worked the purple clouds of the mist. The group of ornaments is distributed over the greenery in such a way that it resembles the branches and needles of a spruce tree.

These clouds are made up of cosmic dust and gas – like the clouds emitted by supernovae at millions of miles per hour – as well as hydrogen and helium.

Although they don’t sound too cozy to us, these are the star farms of the cosmos. All this material is compressed like a ball of dough by gravity into shiny new stars, some of which are larger than the sun.

The Christmas Tree Cluster is also home to hundreds of brown dwarfs, sometimes unceremoniously referred to as “failed stars.” They are weak objects that are too small to achieve enough gravity to compress hydrogen to the point of nuclear fusion.

Unfortunately, there is no big star on this Christmas tree – not even in the literal sense.

Instead, the top of the cluster was exposed after scientists rotated the image about 150 degrees from the astronomer’s standard north orientation.

The group of Christmas trees actually has a purple hue (Photo: Dr. Jean Dean/SWNS)

NGC 2264 consists of two gigantic astronomical objects: the unfiguratively named Cone Nebula and the Christmas Tree Cluster itself.

Unfortunately, the nearby Snowflake Cluster and the Foxfur Nebula didn’t make it.

NASA has long been known to spread the holiday spirit. In 2018, the agency released a video of the remnants of a supernova explosion titled SNR 0509-67.5.

Not the catchiest name for a stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud, about 160,000 light-years from Earth.

But the red, almost spherical ring he left behind certainly was.

Supernova remnant 0509-67.5, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 170,000 light-years from Earth, is depicted in this NASA/ESA award published January 11, 2012. The Hubble Space Telescope optical data of the supernova remnant and its associated star field were compiled with X-ray images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. For Earth observers, the supernova that led to the creation of SNR 0509-67.5 occurred nearly 400 years ago. The bubble-shaped gas cloud is 23 light-years across and is expanding at a speed of more than 11 million miles per hour (5,000 kilometers per second). REUTERS/NASA, ESA, CXC, SAO, Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), J. Hughes (Rutgers University)/Handout (UNITED STATES - Tags: SCIENTIFIC TECHNOLOGY TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT FOR SALE FOR MARKETING OR ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS. THIS IMAGE IS PROVIDED BY A THIRD PARTY. It is distributed exactly as REUTERS received it, as a courtesy to customers

The bubble-shaped gas cloud has a diameter of 23 light years and is expanding at a speed of more than 18 million kilometers per hour (Photo: Reuters)

This panchromatic image of the MACS0416 cluster was created by combining infrared observations from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope with visible-light data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. To create the image, the shortest wavelengths of light were generally colored blue, the longest wavelengths red, and the middle wavelengths green. The resulting wavelength coverage of 0.4 to 5 micrometers reveals a vibrant landscape of galaxies that could be considered one of the most colorful images of the universe ever captured. MACS0416 is a cluster of galaxies located about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth. This means that the light we see now left the galaxy cluster shortly after our solar system formed. This cluster amplifies the light from more distant background galaxies through gravitational lensing. This allowed the research team to identify magnified supernovae and even highly magnified individual stars. These colors provide clues to the distances of galaxies: the bluest galaxies are relatively close and often exhibit intense star formation, as best shown by Hubble, while the redder galaxies tend to be further away or otherwise contain large amounts of dust, as was the best. demonstrated by Webb. . The image reveals a wealth of detail that can only be captured by combining the power of both space telescopes. In this image, blue represents data at wavelengths of 0.435, 0.606, 0.814, and 1.05 micrometers (Hubble filters F435W, F606W, F814W, and F105W). Green combines data from 0.90, 1.15, 1.5, 1.6, 2.0 and 2.77 microns (Hubble filter F160W and Webb filter F090W, F115W, F150W, F200W and F277W). 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Because more than a dozen celestial objects flicker on and off for days or months, scientists dubbed this the “Christmas Tree Galaxy Luster” (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/J. Diego).

Last month, NASA experts used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to image the “Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster,” a reference to galaxies colliding about 4,300,000,000 light-years away.

Scientists weren’t kidding about it.

The astronomers said that in the winter wonderland of galaxies within MACS0416, there are fourteen celestial objects, or “transients” as scientists call them, that flicker like Christmas tree lights.

“We call MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it is so colorful and because of the flickering lights we find within it,” said astronomer Haojing Yan, one of the study’s authors.

“We can see transients everywhere.”

However, we suspect the Cosmos Christmas card he sent you ended up in the mail.

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