Cosmic ‘Christmas Tree Cluster’ perfect universal Yuletide ornament

While Madam Pele delights Hawai’i with Yuletide gifts of lava fountains and a glowing red lava lake within the summit caldera of the Big Island’s Kilauea volcano, the universe has decked the halls with a cosmic Christmas centerpiece.

The “Christmas Tree Cluster,” or NGC 2264, is an array of young stars — all between 1 and 5 million years old — that is about 2,500 light-years, or 14.7 quadrillion miles, from Earth in the Milky Way.

Stars in the cluster are smaller and larger than our sun, ranging from some less than one-tenth the mass of our solar system’s star to others about seven times the size of our sun.

Our sun is also middle-aged, about 5 billion years old, or about 1,000 times older than the stars in NGC 2264.

An image of the cosmic Christmas tree shows the the cluster in the shape of a tree with glowing steallar lights. The composite also enhances the resemblance to our familiar holiday firs through color choices and rotation.

The blue and white lights — which blink in the animated version — are young stars that give off X-rays detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory in Cambridge, Mass.

Gas in the nebula is shown as green, corresponding to the “pine needles” of the tree, using optical data from the National Science Foundation’s WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak in Pima County, Ariz.

Infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which took place between 1997 and 2001, also shows foreground and background stars in white.

Furthermore, the image was rotated clockwise about 160 degrees to point upward so it appears like the top of the “tree” is toward the top of the image.

“Young stars, like those in NGC 2264, are volatile and undergo strong flares in X-rays and other types of variations seen in different types of light,” said a NASA article from Dec. 19, 2023. “The coordinated, blinking variations shown in this animation, however, are artificial, to emphasize the locations of the stars seen in X-rays and highlight the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree. In reality the variations of the stars are not synchronized.”

The variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by several different processes.

Some are related to activity involving magnetic fields, including flares such as those undergone by our sun — but much more powerful — and hot spots and dark regions on the surfaces of the stars that go in and out of view as the stars rotate.

Changes in the thickness of gas obscuring the stars are also possible as well as the amount of material still falling onto the stars from disks of surrounding gas.

And there is a “slight bare patch” in the “tree branches” in the lower right that probably should have been turned to the corner, so this celstial seasonal spruce might be a little “Charlie Brown.”

O, but this Christmas tree star array is still, o, the perfect festive universal Yuletide ornament.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.

News reporter Nathan Christophel contributed to this story.