2023-12-22 20:11:39
NASA scientists have discovered a cosmic Christmas tree in the Milky Way. It is a composite image showing a cluster of young stars, which the agency has named the “Christmas tree cluster.”
The Milky Way also has its Christmas tree. Like every year, as the holidays approach, NASA has put online a new image of “NGC 2264”, a cluster of young stars, located around 2500 light years from Earth, which is also known as the name “Christmas tree cluster”. It is actually a composite image – in other words, an assembly of several photos – whose colors have also been modified to reinforce the resemblance to a Christmas tree. In the animated version above, the stars flash and twinkle on the tree, like lights on a Christmas tree.
The illusion is made possible thanks to modifications of the images provided by two space telescopes, and a third on Earth. On his site internetNASA describes how its teams proceeded to give root to this cosmic Christmas tree. “The blue and white lights are young stars detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Optical data from the WIYN telescope (…) shows the nebula’s gas in green, which corresponds to the ‘pine needles’ of the tree. And infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars as white.”
And that’s not all ! To give it the right shape, “The image has been rotated approximately 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upward. This places the roughly conical top of the tree near the top of the image “, explains the American agency. Even though the NGC 2264 cluster is populated by young stars, some have a mass equivalent to seven times the mass of our Sun. The work carried out by the little elves of NASA is quite astonishing. This is also the magic of the cosmos!
Matthieu DELACHARLERY
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