Sometimes things in the archive go unprocessed because they are, well, boring. There are probably at least a dozen of these elliptical galaxies sitting in there—good data and good images—but visually uninspiring. These are the most common types of galaxies, though. In this one it looks like there’s still a small amount of star formation going on in the slightly bluer area on the left side. A great lecture I’ve found on not only elliptical galaxies but on all sorts of galaxies is here. Professor Crawford talks about colliding galaxies but there is a lot of information on the evolution of galaxies and how we arrive at big, old ellipticals.
Red: hst_11835_01_wfc3_uvis_f775w_sci
Green: Pseudo
Blue: hst_11835_01_wfc3_uvis_f555w_sci
North is NOT up. It is 39.8° counter-clockwise from up.
Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.