Standing out from the crowd: A lone source shines out brightly from the dark expanse of deep space, glowing softly against a picturesque backdrop of distant stars and colourful galaxies. Captured by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), this scene shows PGC 83677, a lenticular galaxy — a galaxy type that sits between the more familiar elliptical and spiral varieties in the Hubble sequence. This image was obtained as part of the Coma Cluster Survey. It reveals both the relatively calm outskirts and intriguing core of PGC 83677. Here, studies have uncovered signs of a monstrous black hole that is spewing out high-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light.

Name: PGC 83677
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Lenticular
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Coma Berenices
Distance: 300 million light years
Release date: 12 September 2016, 06:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA Acknowledgements: Judy Schmidt (Geckzilla)

Cosmic fragments: This  intriguing new image captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a dust-bathed cluster of fragments from a disintegrated comet. The comet in question, named 332P/Ikeya-Murakami, split into this shower of fragments in the closing months of 2015. Fragmenting comets such as 332P/Ikeya-Murakami have long been objects of fascination for astronomers worldwide. Famously, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 disintegrated in 1992, crashing into the atmosphere of Jupiter at nearly 200 000 kilometres per hour, creating scars on it almost half the size of Earth. Though well-studied, objects such as this remain a puzzle to astronomers; no theory fully  explains why comets split apart on their long journeys around the Sun. Hubble will continue to observe 332P/Ikeya-Murakami and comets like it, unravelling the nature of these mysterious objects.

Name: 332P/Ikeya–Murakami
Type: Solar System : Interplanetary Body : Comet
Category: Solar System
Release date: 19 September 2016, 06:00
Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

The hidden dark side of NGC 24: This shining disc of a spiral galaxy sits approximately 25 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Sculptor. Named NGC 24, the galaxy was discovered by British astronomer William Herschel in 1785, and measures some 40 000 light-years across. This picture was taken using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys, known as ACS for short. It shows NGC 24 in detail, highlighting the blue bursts (young stars), dark lanes (cosmic dust), and red bubbles (hydrogen gas) of material peppered throughout the galaxy’s spiral arms. Numerous distant galaxies can also been seen hovering around NGC 24’s perimeter. However, there may be more to this picture than first meets the eye. Astronomers suspect that spiral galaxies like NGC 24 and the Milky Way are surrounded by, and contained within, extended haloes of dark matter. Dark matter is a mysterious substance that cannot be seen; instead, it reveals itself via its gravitational interactions with surrounding material. Its existence was originally proposed to explain why the outer parts of galaxies, including our own, rotate unexpectedly fast, but it is thought to also play an essential role in a galaxy’s formation and evolution. Most of NGC 24’s mass — a whopping 80 % — is thought to be held within such a dark halo.

Name: NGC 24
Type: Local Universe : Galaxy : Type : Spiral
Category: Galaxies
Constellation: Sculptor
Distance: 25 million light years
Release date: 26 September 2016, 06:00
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA