Comparison With Giant Ellipticals
Dwarf elliptical galaxies have blue absolute magnitudes within the range -18 mag < M < -14 mag, fainter than giant elliptical galaxies. While the surface brightness profiles of giant elliptical galaxies are well described by de Vaucouleur's law, dEs have exponentially declining surface brightness profiles. However, both types can be well fit by the same more general law, Sersic's law, and there is a continuity of Sersic index as a function of luminosity, suggesting that dwarf and giant elliptical galaxies belong to a single sequence. Still fainter elliptical-like galaxies, called dwarf spheroidal galaxies, appear to be genuinely distinct.
Read more about this topic: Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy
Famous quotes containing the words comparison with, comparison and/or giant:
“In everyone’s youthful dreams, philosophy is still vaguely but inseparably, and with singular truth, associated with the East, nor do after years discover its local habitation in the Western world. In comparison with the philosophers of the East, we may say that modern Europe has yet given birth to none.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: “his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“So in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation blithely to declare yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)