MIAMI.- A true cosmic gift for humanity is the image published by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) showing a star cluster that looks like a Christmas tree.
The image of NGC 2264, an acronym that identifies a star formation location, shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the brightness of lights, NASA reported in a statement.
NGC 2264 is the region where a group of young starswith ages between one and five million years, in the Milky Way, said the US Special Agency.
NASA shared that image revealing unique details thanks to the combination of two high-power telescopes and an advanced color technique.
The capture exhibits a distinctive glow in green tones and points of light that evoke Christmas decorations. Such dots, which look like twinkling lights, actually represent young stars emitting X-rays; green, for its part, corresponds to gaseous emissions.
Christmas is lived even in space
NASA discovered called this star cluster in space known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” which has a glow similar to that of a Christmas tree. That stellar cluster located approximately 2,500 light years from Earth.
“This image has been rotated clockwise about 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of the North pointing up, so that it appears that the top of the tree is toward the top of the image,” the statement said. the American space agency.
According to Haojing Yan, a scientist at the University of Missouri, the image is special “both because of its color and because of these flashing lights that we found in it,” combining photographs in visible and infrared light from the James Webb Space Telescope and the previous Hubble Space Telescope. .
Video produced by NASA
The video that NASA attaches and that shows synchronized flashes that seem christmas tree lights, it is not natural, but artificial, but to a certain extent. Young stars emit calls, which create these flashes, but the difference is that they are not synchronized. It has been done intentionally to create a better Christmas card.
“The coordinated and flickering variations shown in the animation are to highlight the location of the stars seen in X-rays and highlight the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree,” NASA clarifies in the press release.
Although the image has been edited by scientists from the NASA, was taken by its Chandra Observatory. This space telescope is designed to detect X-ray emissions from very hot regions of the universe, such as supernovae, galaxies and matter around black holes.
Source: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) / FORBES/ Infobae / Diario las Américas
