It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas — even in space

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) recently captured a stunning image of a space phenomenon that looks like a Christmas tree in the stars, The Hill reported.

The image shows a cluster of young stars, aged between one and five million years old, known as NGC 2264 or the “Christmas Tree Cluster”, according to Nasa, an independent space agency of the United States government.

The NGC 2264 cluster is located in the Milky Way, about 2,500 light-years from Earth and is made up of stars both “smaller and larger than the Sun, ranging from some with less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to others containing about seven solar masses,” said Nasa.

The cluster appears like a cosmic tree with strings of glowing lights with green gas within, representing the tree’s “pine needles.”

“The blue and white lights are young stars that give off X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory,” the agency added.

“Optical data from the National Science Foundation’s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak shows gas in the nebula in green, corresponding to the ‘pine needles’ of the tree, and infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars in white.”

Nasa has rotated the image about 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upwards, which puts the peak of the conical tree shape near the top.

The space agency’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shared an animation on X, formerly known as Twitter, that shows newly-formed stars in clusters that look like blinking Christmas lights.

Nasa said those new stars are “volatile and can cause strong flares when captured by X-rays and other types of variations seen through different types of light.”

However, the “blinking lights” in the video were artificially created to emphasise the locations of the stars seen in Nasa’s X-rays. The stars are not synchronised in real life.