It’s beginning to look a lot likeChristmasup in space.
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Unveiling a composite image of the new cluster, NASA said on its website that “the stars in NGC 2264 are both smaller and larger than the Sun, ranging from some with less than a tenth the mass of the Sun to others containing about seven solar masses.”
NASA
NASA characterized young stars like the ones found in this cluster as “volatile” and “undergo strong flares in X-rays and other types of variations seen in different types of light.” Ananimated version of the composite imageshows blinking lights, but that was artificially created to show the location of the stars seen in X-rays.
“In reality, the variations of the stars are not synchronized,” said the agency.
NASA said the Christmas Tree Cluster, whose stars’ ages range between 1 and 5 million years old, is located in the Milky Way approximately 2,500 light-years away from Earth.NASA
The announcement of the new cluster comes a month after NASA revealed a new view of the universe via a galaxy cluster with assistance from both the James Webb Space Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope,CBS Newspreviously reported.
The cluster, MACS0416, is located approximately 4.3 billion light-years from Earth,according to the space agency.
The resulting composite image offers an abundance of detail through the combination of both space telescopes, said NASA, adding, “It includes a bounty of galaxies outside the cluster and a sprinkling of sources that vary over time, likely due to gravitational lensing – the distortion and amplification of light from distant background sources.”
MACS0416 has been dubbed the “Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster” because “it’s so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere,” said Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri in Columbia and an author of a study detailing the scientific results.
In keeping with the holiday theme, NASA’s website Wednesday posted an image ofthe dwarf galaxy UGC 8091, which looks like a “sparkling snow globe.” The image was created based on information from the Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys via the Hubble Space Telescope.
source: people.com
