Chandra Release - December 22, 2025

Visual Description: Cosmic Holiday Greetings  

This release features four colorful composite images presented in an irregular grid, each evoking an aspect of winter and the holiday season.

The first image, at our upper left, features a pair of colliding galaxies that resembles a snowman in optical light from Hubble when oriented vertically. The two galaxies, NGC 4782 and NGC 4783, appear as hazy white balls with solid white cores, one stacked above the other. Linking the two galaxies is a bridge of hot gas in X-ray light from Chandra depicted here as a string of fuzzy neon purple balls. The string of gas loosely zigzags back and forth between the two galaxies, like a cozy scarf worn by a snowman.

The second holiday image, at the upper right of the irregular grid, strongly resembles a golden Christmas tree bedecked with twinkling lights. The tree is actually NGC 2264, a relatively young nebula where new stars are forming. The tree's branches, which sweep back and forth in a roughly conical shape, are golden clouds of dust and gas, all from optical light captured by an astrophotographer. Tucked into these branches are colorful lights and glowing baubles in X-rays from Chandra and XMM-Newton, colored in green, blue, purple, and orange; baby stars growing inside the nebula.

At the lower lefthand corner of the grid is a winter scene fit for a holiday greeting card. Above what appears to be a fantastical snowy mountainscape, is a brilliant blue sky packed with colorful lights. The golden mountainscape is in fact part of the nebula NGC 6357, as captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The green, red, and golden lights in the blue sky above are bursts of high-energy X-rays from active stars, detected by Chandra.

The final holiday image, at the lower right of the grid, is a nebula which calls to mind the first gift in the Christmas carol 'The Twelve Days of Christmas'. Here, the wispy burnt orange nebula, M78, forms a tree, with a vertical trunk near the center of the image in infrared and optical light from the European Space Agency's Euclid mission. The tree's bushy branches reach toward our upper left, and its tail of roots drifts toward our lower right. The tree of interstellar dust is offset by a pink cloud, which resembles cotton candy, and is backed by a black sky packed with speckled lights. At the top of the tree, near the upper lefthand corner of the image, is a dusty orange cloud shape which strongly resembles a bird in profile; the proverbial partridge in the pear tree. Sprinkled across are tiny dots of colorful lights, showcasing X-rays captured by Chandra.