One of the most iconic symbols of the season, a Christmas tree. This celestial version takes an optical light image (red, gold, blue, and white) from an astrophotographer that shows the “branches” of NGC 2264, a relatively young nebula where new stars are forming. Within this cloud of gas and dust, baby stars appear as high-energy baubles in X-ray light from Chandra (red, green, and blue) plus some additional X-ray data from ESA’s XMM-Newton.
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Beauty
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How many light years would you say those stars in the center are from each other?
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From NASA:
One of the most iconic symbols of the season, a Christmas tree. This celestial version takes an optical light image (red, gold, blue, and white) from an astrophotographer that shows the “branches” of NGC 2264, a relatively young nebula where new stars are forming. Within this cloud of gas and dust, baby stars appear as high-energy baubles in X-ray light from Chandra (red, green, and blue) plus some additional X-ray data from ESA’s XMM-Newton.
Beauty
How many light years would you say those stars in the center are from each other?