Question

refer to the accompanying photos of an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy to answer the following: which image (a or b) is an elliptical galaxy? which of these galaxies appears to contain more young, hot, massive stars? how did you determine your answer? when stars are born from a cloud of dust and gases, high- and low-mass stars form at about the same time. which group of stars, high-mass or lowmass, will die out first? over time, how will this affect the color of the light we observe coming from this group of stars?

Answer 1

An elliptical galaxy is a type of galaxy in the Hubble sequence characterized by having a roughly ellipsoidal shape and hardly any distinctive features, lacking, for example, the spiral arms that characterize the homonymous galaxies. They are one of the four main classes of galaxies described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work The Realm of the Nebulae,1 along with spiral and lenticular galaxies. Elliptical galaxies (E) are, along with lenticular galaxies (S0) with their large-scale disks, and ES2​3​4​ galaxies with their intermediate-scale disks, a subset of the "early-type" galaxy population. ".

Most elliptical galaxies are composed of older, low-mass stars, with a sparse interstellar medium and minimal star formation activity, and tend to be surrounded by large numbers of globular clusters. Elliptical galaxies are thought to make up about 10-15% of the galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster, and are not the dominant galaxy type in the universe as a whole.5 They are found preferentially near the centers of galaxy clusters .6​

Elliptical galaxies range in size from dwarf ellipticals with tens of millions of stars, to supergiants with over a hundred trillion stars dominating their galaxy clusters. Originally, Edwin Hubble hypothesized that elliptical galaxies evolved into spiral galaxies, which was later found to be false,7 although the accumulation of gas and smaller galaxies can form a disk around a pre-existing ellipsoidal structure.8 9 The stars found within elliptical galaxies are, on average, much older than the stars found in spiral galaxies.7

Step-by-step explanation: