NASA: 'It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Cosmos'

"It's beginning to look a lot like cosmos," NASA joked in a post on X with a new image of the "Christmas Tree Cluster." NASA also released an animation of NGC 2264, a cluster of young stars between 1 million and 5 million years old. NASA said the green that makes the composite image look like a Christmas tree is gas, and the blue and white lights that look like tree decorations are young stars giving off X-rays, CBS News reports. The cluster is in the Milky Way, around 2,500 light-years from our solar system.

"Some of the stars in the cluster are relatively small, and some are relatively large, ranging from one tenth to seven times the mass of our sun," NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory said. NASA said that in the animation, the lights were artificially depicted blinking in unison "to emphasize the locations of the stars seen in X-rays and highlight the similarity of this object to a Christmas tree." Astronomer William Herschel discovered the cluster in January 1784, the BBC reports. Two years later, around Christmas time, he detected part of the glowing cloud. (More astronomy stories.)