The young collection of stars and gases looks like a Christmas tree, although there is a little trick to it.
the NASA His Chandra Observatory discovered a special cluster of stars and gas about 2,500 light-years from Earth.
Astronomers refer to their discovery, called NGC 2264, as the Christmas Tree Cluster, because it looks just like a pine tree.
Meanwhile, NASA revealed that the image appears green and Christmas tree-shaped due to an optical illusion. The 0.9-meter WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak Observatory shows the gas in the nebula in green, and the infrared lights of the 2MASS Astronomical Survey show the foreground and background stars in white.
The Space Research Organization added that the image was rotated clockwise by about 160 degrees, and this is how the image of a “Christmas tree” appears.
NASA said that NGC 2264 is a group of young stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, and is about one to five million years old. The stars in NGC 2264 vary in size relative to the Sun, some smaller and some much larger than our Sun. As a result, their mass is not the same, as the mass of each star is only one tenth of the mass of the Sun, but some of them are seven times heavier.
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