Tour: Cosmic Holiday Greetings From NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is sending out a holiday card with four new images of cosmic wonders. Each of the quartet of objects evokes the winter season or one of its celebratory days, either in its name or shape.

Chandra’s seasonal greetings begin with NGC 4782 and NGC 4783, a pair of colliding galaxies that when oriented in a certain way resembles a snowman. The top and bottom of the snowman are each elliptical galaxies, separated by a distance of about 30,000 light-years. The galaxies, seen in an image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, are bound together through gravity. X-rays from Chandra show a bridge of hot gas between the two galaxies, like a winter scarf.

After the cosmic snowman is one of the most iconic symbols of the season, a Christmas tree. This celestial version takes an optical light image 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 and XMM-Newton.

The nebula NGC 6357 contains Pismis 24, a young cluster of stars about 5,500 light-years from Earth. This stellar landscape is reminiscent of a winter vista in a view from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Chandra data punctuate the scene with bursts of colored lights representing high-energy activity from turbulent young stars.

The final image in this holiday card display is M78, a striking nebula in the Orion constellation that may also bring a partridge in the proverbial pear tree to mind. M78 is a reflection nebula, which is cloud interstellar dust that glows from the scattered light embedded within it. The bird-like structure is seen in infrared and optical light by Euclid while Chandra data provide speckled lights across the nebula.