Photo credit: Britannica | NASA
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory recently captured the bright Christmas tree cluster, designated as NGC 2264, located 2,500 light-years away in our own Milky Way galaxy. The stars you see range from less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to others containing around seven solar masses.
All of the young stars that you can see in NGC 2264 are volatile and undergoing strong flares in X-rays as well as other types of variations seen in different types of light. However, the coordinated, blinking variations observed in this animation are artificial, and created to emphasize the locations of the stars seen in X-rays as well as showcase the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree.
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The variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by several different processes. Some of these are related to activity involving magnetic fields, including flares like those undergone by the 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,” said Lee Mohon, Web / Social Media Content Editor at NASA.
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