What are 3 facts about the elliptical galaxy?

What are 3 facts about the elliptical galaxy?

The largest elliptical galaxies can be over a million light-years in diameter. The smallest “dwarf elliptical” galaxies are less than one-tenth the size of the Milky Way! Elliptical galaxies have very little gas and dust. Since stars form from gas, little star formation occurs in elliptical galaxies.

Is the Milky Way galaxy an elliptical?

The Milky Way is a huge collection of stars, dust and gas. It’s called a spiral galaxy because if you could view it from the top or bottom, it would look like a spinning pinwheel. The Sun is located on one of the spiral arms, about 25,000 light-years away from the center of the galaxy.

What causes an elliptical galaxy?

As the galaxies approach each other, gravitational forces start to pull the stars, gas, and dust of the spiral arms out of their original orbits. This is what causes the warped shape of famously interacting pairs such as the Mice (NGC 4676) and the Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038 and NGC 4039).

What does an elliptical galaxy contain?

The most massive can contain nearly a trillion stars, or about a thousand times more than the Milky Way. The apparent simplicity of an elliptical galaxy—a massive ball of stars—can be deceptive.

What is unique about an elliptical galaxy?

Four classes are used to classify galaxies: spiral; barred spiral; elliptical and irregular. Elliptical galaxies have a smooth ellipsoidal or spherical appearance, and they have far less structure than spiral galaxies do. Elliptical galaxies are typically found in galaxy clusters.

What best describes an elliptical galaxy?

An elliptical galaxy is a type of galaxy with an approximately ellipsoidal shape and a smooth, nearly featureless image. They are one of the four main classes of galaxy described by Edwin Hubble in his Hubble sequence and 1936 work The Realm of the Nebulae, along with spiral and lenticular galaxies.

What are 4 types of galaxies?

The smallest of galaxies contain a “mere” few hundred million stars while the largest galaxies contain up to one hundred trillion stars! Scientists have been able to segment galaxies into 4 main types: spiral, elliptical, peculiar, and irregular.

Can life exist in an elliptical galaxy?

ABSTRACT. Based on numbers of stars, supernova rates, and metallicity, a prior study concluded that large elliptical galaxies contain up to 10 000 times more habitable planets than the Milky Way and are thus the ‘cradles of life’.

What are the 3 types of galaxies?

What Kinds of Galaxies Are There? Astronomers classify galaxies into three major categories: elliptical, spiral and irregular. These galaxies span a wide range of sizes, from dwarf galaxies containing as few as 100 million stars to giant galaxies with more than a trillion stars.

What is a elliptical galaxy called?

The adjective elliptical refers to the shape of an ellipse, which is an elongated circle, stretched into an oval. This word can also be used to describe a way of speaking that cuts out extra, unnecessary language.

Do elliptical galaxies spin?

Unlike spiral galaxies, elliptical galaxies are not supported by rotation. The orbits of the constituent stars are random and often very elongated, leading to a shape for the galaxy determined by the speed of the stars in each direction.

What is the closest elliptical galaxy to Earth?

The Large and Small Magellanic clouds were thought to be the closest galaxies to ours, until 1994, when the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy (SagDEG) was discovered. In 2003, the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy was discovered – this is now the closest known galaxy to ours!

Do elliptical galaxies have black holes?

It is now widely accepted that virtually every elliptical galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole (SMBH) at its centre with its mass tightly correlated with the mass and stellar velocity dispersion of the galaxy itself (e.g. Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002).

How does an elliptical galaxy work?

When two spirals collide, they lose their familiar shape, morphing into the less-structured elliptical galaxies. A supermassive black hole is thought to lie at the center of these ancient galaxies. These gluttonous giants consume gas and dust, and may play a role in the slower growth of elliptical galaxies.

What stars are in an elliptical galaxy?

In fact, elliptical galaxies contain primarily old, red stars (also known as Population II stars). Elliptical galaxies vary widely in size. Both the largest and the smallest known galaxies are elliptical.

How old is the elliptical galaxy?

The accepted belief on the mass assembly history of massive elliptical galaxies based on their stellar population leads to an age between 7 and 10 billion years old.

What is the largest elliptical galaxy?

The Largest Known Galaxy: IC 1101 As an elliptical galaxy, IC 1101 contains an abundance of low to medium mass red and yellow stars, most of which are quite old.

How many elliptical galaxies are there?

There are 100,000,000,000 galaxies in the universe (best guess). 20 percent of known galaxies are elliptical. If the known galaxies are a good representation of the universe make up then that would mean that 20 percent of all the galaxies would be elliptical.

Does an elliptical galaxy have stars?

Instead of spiral arms, elliptical galaxies are just big clumps of stars. There is very little gas and dust. Because there is not much gas and dust, there’s not enough material to make new stars. In general, the stars in elliptical galaxies are old, red stars.