Galaxies come in a variety of shapes. The most photogenic are the spirals, with great blue arms of molecular gas and star formation, so you see more pictures of those in textbooks than other types. At left is NGC 1097, a barred spiral, with recent star formation outlining the spiral arms and reddish dust in the bar; just to the right of center is a supernova. That's not what our survey is about.
The most complicated are the irregulars, which are, well, irregular. Compared to these the ellipticals and lenticulars look pretty boring: generally round lumps of old stars, without star formation or anything else exciting going on. They see some use in graduate courses on stellar dynamics mostly because they're so unexciting they can be dealt with mathematically in a pen-and-paper way, but in general astronomers looking for spectacle go elsewhere.
[Ellipticals, including spheroidals, and lenticulars are called "early-type" galaxies as a sort of analogy with "early" and "late" type stars, a set of labels leftover from a long-dead theory of stellar evolution. It turned out to be useful to retain the labels even though the basis for them disappeared. So galaxies that look generally smooth and elliptical, from circular through to lens-like shapes, are called "early" and spirals are called "late," even though there is nothing early or late implied.]
This is an oversimplified picture, of course. Dust and gas have been found in early types, some are forming stars, some have active nuclei and all have a more or less interesting history. But to tease out the accurate picture you need to look at observations from all wavelengths, X-Ray through radio, and apply a range of modern analysis techniques: dynamical modelling, stellar population synthesis, interstellar chemistry. To do this well the galaxies need to be close enough to yield detailed data of high signal to noise, while still being numerous enough that one's conclusions will be generally applicable. That's the motivation for our Local Early-type Galaxy Survey.
At right is an example of what happens when you move away from simple pictures
in optical wavebands and start putting things together. The underlying image
is a (negative) optical picture of NGC 1553; overlaid is a contour map of radio
emission. There's a lot going on here, clearly. Our goal is to work it out.
Unfortunately, contstraints of time and funding mean that my efforts as well as those of the Group here at Birmingham are directed elsewhere, and LEGS is not an active project at the moment.