![]() ![]() Galaxy evolution is a far more complex process than Hubble imagined, involving the conditions of the galaxy's initial collapse, collisions with other galaxies, and the ebb and flow of internal star birth. Hence "Sa" and "SBa" galaxies were called "early-type," while "Sc" and "SBc" were called "late-type."Īstronomers still use this nomenclature today, though the initial concept was later found to be an over-simplification. Those include irregular galaxies which have odd shapes, dwarf galaxies which are very small, and giant elliptical galaxies which are very large elliptical galaxies residing in the centers of some clusters of galaxies.įor a time the Hubble tuning fork was thought to be an evolutionary sequence - that galaxies might evolve from one type to another progressing from left to right across the tuning-fork diagram. Hubble found that some galaxies are difficult to put in the context of the tuning fork diagram. "S0," or lenticular galaxies, are in the transition zones between ellipticals and spirals and bridge these two types. ![]() An "SBc" is thus a loosely wound barred spiral galaxy. Barred spirals have a "B" in their classification. The spiral arms in barred spirals usually start at the end of the bar instead of from the bulge. The most important difference between these two groups is the bar of stars that runs through the central bulge in barred spirals. In fact the spiral galaxies are sub-divided into two groups - normal spirals and barred spirals. There are indications pointing to a very close connection between the bulges of certain galaxies (Hubble types "S0", "Sa" and "Sb") and elliptical galaxies. The Pinwheel Galaxy (also known as Messier 101, M101 or NGC 5457) is a face-on spiral galaxy 21 million light-years (6.4 megaparsecs) 5 away from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. Also it is worth noting that the sizes of the round central regions in spirals - the so-called bulges - increase in size the more tightly the spiral arms are wound. "Sa" spirals, for example, are tightly wound whereas "Sc" spirals are more loosely wound. ![]() The spirals were assigned letters from "a" to "c," which characterize the compactness of their spiral arms. Hubble gave the ellipticals numbers from zero to seven, which characterize the ellipticity of the galaxy - "E0" is almost round, "E7" is very elliptical. The diagram is roughly divided into two parts: elliptical galaxies (ellipticals) and spiral galaxies (spirals). Although this scheme, also known as the Hubble tuning fork diagram, is now considered somewhat too simple, the basic ideas still hold. As one of the first steps towards a coherent theory of galaxy evolution, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, developed a classification scheme of galaxies in 1926. Some are simple, while others are very complex in structure. The subclasses are divided based on the dominance of the bulge component of the galaxy. Galaxies are very important fundamental building blocks of the Universe. A spiral galaxy is classified as an S galaxy with subclassification a, b, or c, so for example, M51 above is classified as an Sb galaxy. slightly flattened systems are labeled E1, and so on, all the way to the most. The Hubble tuning fork - Classification of galaxies In Hubbles scheme, a spiral galaxy is denoted by the letter S and. ![]()
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