नवीनतम
NASA telescope spots cosmic Christmas tree
NEW DELHI [Maha Media]: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory recently spotted a cluster of young stars in our Milky Way Galaxy that looks like a cosmic Christmas tree. The NGC 2264 cluster, also known as the "Christmas Tree Cluster", is located about 2,500 light-years away from Earth.
The stars in NGC 2264 are both smaller and larger than our Sun, ranging from some with less than one-tenth the mass of the Sun to seven times the mass of our Sun. The stars are between one and five million years old, compared to the Sun's age of 5 billion years old.
The blue and white lights are young stars that give off X-rays detected by Chandra. The green color represents gas in the nebula (Optical data from NSF's WIYN 0.9-meter telescope on Kitt Peak), resembling the "pine needles" of the cosmic tree. Additionally, the infrared data shows foreground and background stars as gleaming specks of white against the blackness of space.
"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," according to NASA.
The variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by several different processes, some of which are tied to activity involving magnetic fields, including flares like those undergone by the Sun.
