“Celebrating the holiday season with a new image of the ‘Christmas Tree Cluster’… This group of young stars, about 1-5 million years old, is located about 2,500 light-years from Earth,” the company tweeted. NASA agency, Chandra Observatory.

According to NASA, the new image of NGC 2264, also known as the “Christmas Tree Cluster,” shows the shape of a cosmic tree with the glow of stellar lights. NGC 2264 is, in fact, a cluster of young stars — between about one and five million years old — in our Milky Way, about 2,500 light-years from Earth. The stars in NGC 2264 are both smaller and larger than the Sun. Some are less than one-tenth the mass of the Sun while others contain about seven solar masses.

As NASA reports, this new composite image enhances the resemblance to a Christmas tree through color options and rotation. The blue and white lights (blinking in the animated version of this image) are young X-ray emitting stars detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Optical data from the National Science Foundation-supported WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak show a gas nebula in the cluster in green, corresponding to the “pine needles” of the tree. Finally, infrared data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey shows foreground and background stars in white. This image has been rotated clockwise 160 degrees from the north-up astronomer’s standard, so that it appears as if the top of the tree is towards the top of the image.

According to NASA, young stars like those in NGC 2264 are volatile and produce strong X-ray flares and other types of variations seen in different wavelengths of light. The coordinated flickering variations shown in this animation, however, are artificial, to emphasize the positions of the stars seen in the X-rays and to emphasize the resemblance of this object to a Christmas tree. Actually the variations of the stars are not synchronized.

As NASA notes, the variations observed by Chandra and other telescopes are caused by many different processes. Some of these are related to activity involving magnetic fields, including flares like those experienced by the Sun – but much more powerful – and hot spots and dark regions on the surfaces of stars that move in and out of view as the stars rotate. There may also be changes in the thickness of the gas obscuring the stars and changes in the amount of material still falling onto the stars from the surrounding gas disks.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.