This month, space feels a bit more festive.

That could be because of a new composite image of the Christmas Tree Cluster that shows star formation in a merry way, complete with green pine needles and twinkling lights. This image, in fact, arrives to our computer screens just after we laid eyes on the James Webb Space Telescope‘s cosmic Christmas ornament portrait and shortly before the Hubble Space Telescope released its version of a Christmas “globe.”

But returning to the tree, various wavelengths and telescopes were used to create the image. The gas is seen in the optical category, lit up in green from observations from the WIYN Observatory. Foreground and background stars, shown in white, were imaged in the infrared with the Two Micron All Sky Survey, or 2MASS. But what really makes this tree twinkle are aspects of the image provided by Chandra. This data shows actual stars in X-Ray wavelengths, which blink in blue and white in the animated image below.

These stars really do “blink” (although not in the coordinated way shown). The young stars, only about 1 to 5 million years old, undergo dramatic variations in brightness. Sometimes, this results from a star’s rotation. As a star turns, hot spots or dark regions pop in and out of view, making it appear that the star is changing brightness. Other times, the variation in brightness may have nothing to do with the star itself but rather originate from the disk that surrounds it, which may periodically obscure the amount of starlight we see.