Cosmic Christmas tree stuns ahead of holidays in new image shared by NASA

As Christmas approaches, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has released an image of a space Christmas tree.

The image is of NGC 2264, a cluster of young stars, which is also known as the "Christmas Tree Cluster".

A cosmic tree

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Released just days before Christmas, the new composite image resembles a Christmas tree, but this is a result of "choices of colour and rotation."

"It's beginning to look a lot like cosmos," wrote NASA on X, formerly Twitter.

There's also an even more festive, Christmas-ey, blinking light version of the image. In it, blinking blue and white lights as per the space agency are "young stars that give off X-rays detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray".

^{(Image credit: NASA)}

In the cosmic images, the green colour of the "pine needles" corresponds to gas in the nebula. This was the result of optical data from the National Science Foundation's WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak. While the twinkling foreground and background stars in white are from infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey.

"This image has been rotated clockwise by about 160 degrees from the astronomer’s standard of North pointing upward, so that it appears like the top of the tree is toward the top of the image," adds NASA.

NGC 2264

The cluster of young stars, NGC 2264, as per NASA, has stars aged between one and five million years, and it is our planet's cosmic neighbour — located in our Milky Way galaxy, just about 2,500 light years away from Earth.

NGC 2264's stars, as per the space agency, vary in size. Some are smaller than our star: the Sun, others are larger. Their sizes range from less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to some as big as seven times the solar mass.