NASA Missions Spot Cosmic 'Wreath' Displaying Stellar Circle of Life

NGC 602

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC; Infrared: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeilder, E.Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand

JPEG (390.6 kb) - Large JPEG (30.8 MB) - Tiff (136.8 MB) - More Images

A Tour of NGC 602 - More Images

---

Since antiquity, wreaths have symbolized the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. It is fitting then that one of the best places for astronomers to learn more about the stellar lifecycle resembles a giant holiday wreath itself.

The star cluster NGC 602 lies on the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, which is one of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way, about 200,000 light-years from Earth. The stars in NGC 602 have fewer heavier elements compared to the Sun and most of the rest of the galaxy. Instead, the conditions within NGC 602 mimic those for stars found billions of years ago when the universe was much younger.

This new image combines data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with a previously released image from the agency’s James Webb Space Telescope. The dark ring-like outline of the wreath seen in Webb data (represented as orange, yellow, green, and blue) is made up of dense clouds of filled dust.

Meanwhile, X-rays from Chandra (red) show young, massive stars that are illuminating the wreath, sending high-energy light into interstellar space. These X-rays are powered by winds flowing from the young, massive stars that are sprinkled throughout the cluster. The extended cloud in the Chandra data likely comes from the overlapping X-ray glow of thousands of young, low-mass stars in the cluster.

NGC 2264, the “Christmas Tree Cluster”
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Clow, M.; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand);
View Animated Version

In addition to this cosmic wreath, a new version of the “Christmas tree cluster” is also now available. Like NGC 602, NGC 2264 is a cluster of young stars between one and five million years old. (For comparison, the Sun is a middle-aged star about 5 billion years old — about 1,000 times older.) In this image of NGC 2264, which is much closer than NGC 602 at a distance of about 2,500 light-years from Earth, Chandra data (red, purple, blue, and white) has been combined with optical data (green and violet) captured from by astrophotographer Michael Clow from his telescope in Arizona in November 2024.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, 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.

Quick Look: NASA Missions Spot Cosmic 'Wreath' Displaying Stellar Circle of Life

Source: NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory

---

Visual Description:

This release includes two composite images, each featuring a star cluster that strongly resembles holiday greenery.

The first image depicts star cluster NGC 602 in vibrant and festive colors. The cluster includes a giant dust cloud ring, shown in greens, yellows, blues, and oranges. The green hues and feathery edges of the ring cloud create the appearance of a wreath made of evergreen boughs. Hints of red representing X-rays provide shading, highlighting layers within the wreath-like ring cloud.

The image is aglow with specks and dots of colorful, festive light, in blues, golds, whites, oranges, and reds. These lights represent stars within the cluster. Some of the lights gleam with diffraction spikes, while others emit a warm, diffuse glow. Upon closer inspection, many of the glowing specks have spiraling arms, indicating that they are, in fact, distant galaxies.

The second image in today's release is a new depiction of NGC 2264, known as the "Christmas Tree Cluster". Here, wispy green clouds in a conical shape strongly resemble an evergreen tree. Tiny specks of white, blue, purple, and red light, stars within the cluster, dot the structure, turning the cloud into a festive, cosmic Christmas tree!

---

Fast Facts for NGC 602:

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC; Infrared: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P. Zeilder, E.Sabbi, A. Nota, M. Zamani; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand
Scale: Image is about 3 arcmin (175 light-years) across.
Category: Normal Stars & Star Clusters
Coordinates (J2000): RA 01h 29m 28.7s | Dec -73° 33´ 40.8"
Constellation: Hydrus
Observation Dates: 11 pointings between 31 March and 29 April, 2010
Observation Time: 80 hours 45 minutes (3 days 8 hours 45 minutes)
Obs. ID: 10985-10986, 11978-11979, 11988-11989, 12130-12131, 12134, 12136, 12207
Instrument: ACIS
References: Oskinova, L. et al, 2013, ApJ, 765 73; arXiv:1301.3500
Color Code: X-ray: red; Infrared: orange, yellow, green, and blue
Distance Estimate: About 200,000 light-years

---

Fast Facts for NGC 2264:

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Clow, M.; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/L. Frattare and K. Arcand
Scale: Image is about 77 arcmin (56 light-years) across.
Category: Normal Stars & Star Clusters
Coordinates (J2000): RA: 06h 40m 42.8s | Dec: +09° 49' 3.6"
Constellation: Monoceros
Observation Dates: 8 observations from February 2002 to December 2011
Observation Time: 137 hours 26 minutes ( 5 days 17 hours 26 mintues)
Obs. IDs: 2540, 2550, 9768, 9769, 13610, 13611, 14368, 14369
Instrument: ACIS
References: Ramirez, S.V., et al., 2004, AJ, 127,2659; arXiv:astro-ph:0401533
Color Code: X-ray: red, green, and blue; Optical: green and white
Distance Estimate: About 2,500 light-years

---

NGC 602: Taken Under the "Wing" of the Small Magellanic Cloud

NGC 602

Credit : X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ.Potsdam/L.Oskinova et al; 

Optical: NASA/STScI; 

Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech

JPEG (910.3 kb)  -  Large JPEG (12.5 MB)  -  Tiff (26.6 MB)
High-Quality Prints -  More Images

 

Tour of NGC 602

More Animations 

The Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) is one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors. Even though it is a small, or so-called dwarf galaxy, the SMC is so bright that it is visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and near the equator. Many navigators, including Ferdinand Magellan who lends his name to the SMC, used it to help find their way across the oceans.

Modern astronomers are also interested in studying the SMC (and its cousin, the Large Magellanic Cloud), but for very different reasons. Because the SMC is so close and bright, it offers an opportunity to study phenomena that are difficult to examine in more distant galaxies.

New Chandra data of the SMC have provided one such discovery: the first detection of X-ray emission from young stars with masses similar to our Sun outside our Milky Way galaxy. The new Chandra observations of these low-mass stars were made of the region known as the "Wing" of the SMC. In this composite image of the Wing the Chandra data is shown in purple, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope is shown in red, green and blue and infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope is shown in red.

Astronomers call all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium - that is, with more than two protons in the atom's nucleus - "metals." The Wing is a region known to have fewer metals compared to most areas within the Milky Way. There are also relatively lower amounts of gas, dust, and stars in the Wing compared to the Milky Way.

Taken together, these properties make the Wing an excellent location to study the life cycle of stars and the gas lying in between them. Not only are these conditions typical for dwarf irregular galaxies like the SMC, they also mimic ones that would have existed in the early Universe.

Most star formation near the tip of the Wing is occurring in a small region known as NGC 602, which contains a collection of at least three star clusters. One of them, NGC 602a, is similar in age, mass, and size to the famous Orion Nebula Cluster. Researchers have studied NGC 602a to see if young stars - that is, those only a few million years old - have different properties when they have low levels of metals, like the ones found in NGC 602a.

Using Chandra, astronomers discovered extended X-ray emission, from the two most densely populated regions in NGC 602a. The extended X-ray cloud likely comes from the population of young, low-mass stars in the cluster, which have previously been picked out by infrared and optical surveys, using Spitzer and Hubble respectively. This emission is not likely to be hot gas blown away by massive stars, because the low metal content of stars in NGC 602a implies that these stars should have weak winds. The failure to detect X-ray emission from the most massive star in NGC 602a supports this conclusion, because X-ray emission is an indicator of the strength of winds from massive stars. No individual low-mass stars are detected, but the overlapping emission from several thousand stars is bright enough to be observed.

The Chandra results imply that the young, metal-poor stars in NGC 602a produce X-rays in a manner similar to stars with much higher metal content found in the Orion cluster in our galaxy. The authors speculate that if the X-ray properties of young stars are similar in different environments, then other related properties -- including the formation and evolution of disks where planets form -- are also likely to be similar.

X-ray emission traces the magnetic activity of young stars and is related to how efficiently their magnetic dynamo operates. Magnetic dynamos generate magnetic fields in stars through a process involving the star's speed of rotation, and convection, the rising and falling of hot gas in the star's interior.

The combined X-ray, optical and infrared data also revealed, for the first time outside our Galaxy, objects representative of an even younger stage of evolution of a star. These so-called “young stellar objects” have ages of a few thousand years and are still embedded in the pillar of dust and gas from which stars form, as in the famous "Pillars of Creation" of the Eagle Nebula. A labeled version shows the location of these young stellar objects (roll your mouse over the image above).

A paper describing these results was published online and in the March 1, 2013 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The first author is Lidia Oskinova from the University of Potsdam in Germany and the co-authors are Wei Sun from Nanjing University, China; Chris Evans from the Royal Observatory Edinburgh, UK; Vincent Hénault-Brunet from University of Edinburgh, UK; You-Hua Chu from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL; John Gallagher III from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI; Martin Guerrero from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain; Robert Gruendl from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL; Manuel Güdel from the University of Vienna, Austria; Sergey Silich from the Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica Optica y Electrónica, Puebla, Mexico; Yang Chen from Nanjing University, China; Yael Nazé from Université de Liège, Liège, Belgium; Rainer Hainich from the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Jorge Reyes-Iturbide from the Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Ilhéus, Brazil.

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

Fast Facts for NGC 602: 

Scale: Image is 3 arcmin across (160 light years)
Category: Normal Stars & Star Clusters
Coordinates (J2000): RA 01h 29m 12.40s | Dec -73° 32' 01.70"
Constellation: Hydrus
Observation Date: 11 pointings between 31 March and 29 April, 2010
Observation Time: 80 hours 45 min (3 days 8 hours 45 min)
Obs. ID: 10985-10986, 11978-11979, 11988-11989, 12130-12131, 12134, 12136, 12207
Instrument: ACIS
References: Oskinova, L. et al, 2013, ApJ, 765 73; arXiv:1301.3500
Color Code: X-ray (Purple); Optical (Red, Green, Blue); Infrared (Red)