This image, taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), both installed on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, shows the peculiar galaxy NGC 3256. The galaxy is about 100 million light-years from Earth and is the result of a past galactic merger, which created its distorted appearance. As such, NGC 3256 provides an ideal target to investigate starbursts that have been triggered by galaxy mergers.

Another image of NGC 3256 was already released in 2008, as part of a collection of interacting galaxies, created for Hubble’s 18th birthday.

Detailed images of the nearby star Beta Pictoris, taken by NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, confirm the existence of not one but two dust disks encircling the star. The images offer tantalizing new evidence for at least one Jupiter-size planet orbiting Beta Pictoris.

The finding ends a decade of scientific speculation that an odd warp in the young star's debris disk may actually be another inclined disk. The recent Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys view - the best visible-light image of Beta Pictoris - clearly shows a distinct secondary disk that is tilted by about 4 degrees from the main disk. The secondary disk is visible out to roughly 24 billion miles (almost 40 billion kilometres) from the star, and probably extends even farther, said astronomers. This Hubble image of Beta Pictoris clearly shows a primary dust disk and a much fainter secondary dust disk. Astronomers used the Advanced Camera's coronagraph to block out the light from the bright star.