Related topics: galaxies · star formation

Citizen astronomers and AI discover 30,000 ring galaxies

Building on the synergy between citizen astronomer classifications and AI, astronomers have discovered approximately 400,000 spiral galaxies and 30,000 ring galaxies in data from the Subaru Telescope. This is the first example ...

Researchers discover cosmic dust storms from Type 1a supernova

Cosmic dust—like dust on Earth—comprises groupings of molecules that have condensed and stuck together in a grain. But the exact nature of dust creation in the universe has long been a mystery. Now, however, an international ...

Hubble looks at a late-type galaxy

This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features NGC 2814, an irregular galaxy that lies about 85 million light-years from Earth. In this image, which was captured using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, the galaxy appears ...

The Milky Way's stolen globular clusters

Modern astronomy holds that all major galaxies (with the Milky Way as no exception) are the accumulation of numerous small mergers. Thus, it should be expected that some of the globular clusters that are now part of our galaxy ...

First scientific results from Galaxy Cruise

Galaxy Cruise, a citizen science project led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), has been sailing the cosmic ocean with citizen astronomers to uncover the secrets of galaxies since 2019.

Hubble views elliptical galaxy Messier 89

This huge ball of stars—around 100 billion in total—is an elliptical galaxy located some 55 million light-years away. Known as Messier 89, this galaxy appears to be perfectly spherical; which is unusual for elliptical ...

page 1 from 18

Elliptical galaxy

An elliptical galaxy is a galaxy having an approximately ellipsoidal shape and a smooth, nearly featureless brightness profile. They range in shape from nearly spherical to highly flattened and in size from hundreds of millions to over one trillion stars.

Elliptical galaxies are one of the three main classes of galaxy originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work “The Realm of the Nebulae”, along with spiral and lenticular galaxies.

Most elliptical galaxies are composed of older, low-mass stars, with a sparse interstellar medium and minimal star formation activity. They are surrounded by large numbers of globular clusters. Elliptical galaxies are believed to make up approximately 10-15% of galaxies in the local Universe but are not the dominant type of galaxy in the universe overall. They are preferentially found close to the centers of galaxy clusters and are less common in the early Universe.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA