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I have noticed the colours seem to vary between spirals and ellipticals. Can we use this to help with our classifications?

April 26, 2017classifications Colours ellipticals help noticed spirals

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I have noticed the colours seem to vary between spirals and ellipticals. Can we use this to help with our classifications?

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A. Well spotted. Massive stars are blue, and also short lived (by astronomical standards, anyway) so we only see them where star formation has occured recently. That tends to be in spiral galaxies, but beware! We’re trying to classify galaxies by shape, not by colour, in part because we would like to find star formation in elliptical galaxies so please use this extra information with caution.