Telescopes: Answering questions for centuries
Telescopes have helped humans to see a universe beyond our world and to find ways to explore it. This week, a very merry photo from NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory shows that even the universe can add Christmas magic to the holiday season.
NASA released a new image of a cluster of young stars known as NGC 2264 just in time for the holiday that looks like a Christmas tree decorated with ornaments and lights. The new composite image uses X-rays detected by Chandra and optical data from the National Science Foundation’s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak in Arizona. The cluster of stars is about 1.5 million years old and located about 2,500 light-years from Earth. The stars in the images are considered “young” because they are estimated to be between 1 and five billion years old, compared to the Sun’s 5 billion years.
The space agency said the star cluster resembles a Christmas tree because of the choices of color and rotation. The ground-based telescope data shows the gas in the nebula in green, like the “pine needles” of a tree, according to NASA. Meanwhile, data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows the foreground and background stars glowing like diamonds in the sky or a string of lights.
An animated version of the image below shows the blue and white lights of the young “sprightly” stars blinking.
NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescope has been operating in space for more than 23 years after launching on the space shuttle. The spacecraft is considered among NASA’s fleet of “great observatories,” including Hubble, Spitzer, and now the James Webb Space Telescope.