2023-12-21 18:00:00
Photo: NASA Twitter
Text: Editorial Cuba Noticias 360
The American space agency (NASA) published an image captured of a nebula located 2,500 light-years from Earth that shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the brightness of starlight.
On their official website, they explain that this new image of NGC 2264 is also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster.” Furthermore, they added that the nebula is, in fact, “a cluster of young stars, between one and five million years old, in our Milky Way.”
About the composite image, NASA said it enhances the resemblance to a Christmas tree through color and rotation options. “The blue and white lights (flashing in the animated version of the image) are young stars emitting X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra Observatory.”
Likewise, they commented that the image has been rotated about 150 degrees with respect to astronomers’ norm that North points upward, which is why the top of the conical shape of the tree is located near the top of the image.
“It’s beginning to look a lot like cosmos” was the expression used by NASA on its X account (formerly Twitter) to celebrate Christmas through this “cosmic tree”, a clear reference to the popular song “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” performed by Michael Bublé.
In the case of the animation, coordinated and flickering variations are shown, which were explained to be artificial, to emphasize the location of the stars seen in X-rays and highlight the similarity of this object with a Christmas tree. In reality, the variations of the stars are not synchronized, NASA stated.
For a better understanding of the phenomenon, the American organization stated that the variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by several different processes, some related to the activity of magnetic fields, including flares like those suffered by the Sun, but much more powerful, and hot spots and dark regions on the surfaces of stars that appear and disappear as they rotate.
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